Support for Farmers

Claire Young Excerpts

Wednesday 21st October 2026 Commons Chamber

[Tim Farron]

I very much agree. My view is that we should be seeking to reopen a window this year, given the number of farmers who were carved out.

[Claire Young (Thornbury and Yate) (LD)]

Does my hon. Friend agree with the point, made by Latteridge Green Farm in my constituency, that decisions about how public funding is spent should be made on the merits of an application and the benefits it can bring, rather than an ability to click quickly?

[Tim Farron]

That is an issue I will come to, but what my hon. Friend says is absolutely the case. If we have a first come, first served system, then there is no assessment of the quality of bids. I am sure that pretty much all the applications were of a high quality, but differential merit was not taken into account. Farmers were excluded simply because they were milking or otherwise doing their job before the window closed.

The SFI was—I think the record will prove this—essentially set up to replace the basic payment scheme. It was implemented disastrously because it was designed disastrously. The Conservative Government failed even to spend the SFI budget when they were in power, underspending the allocation by £358 million. That is money that should have gone to support our farmers and to keep the promises made to them during Brexit—promises that have been broken.

Then, in March 2025, with absolutely no notice, this Labour Government closed the SFI programme for the year, leaving hundreds of farmers outside with absolutely nothing. The Minister at the time, the hon. Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner), is not in his place. I must say that, before his removal, he was becoming an increasingly important advocate for farmers within Government. He apologised for the closure of the SFI, explaining that the scheme was a good one, but that because the application process inherited from the Conservatives was first come, first served, funds were being allocated neither wisely nor fairly, as my hon. Friends have already highlighted.

I remain outraged at that closure in 2025, but the former Farming Minister’s point about the Tory’s first come, first served process is well made. A first come, first served process means that Government funding is allocated randomly at best, not achieving best value for the taxpayer. Even worse, it means that funding disproportionately goes to those farms that are big enough to be able to afford land agents, to be able to have a large farm staff, or to be able to spend much time away from farming to fill out forms. Meanwhile, farmers working 90 hours a week up Langdale, up Longsleddale or in the Eden valley, producing our food, caring for our countryside, with low incomes, get systematically shut out by accident or by design; the impact remains horrific either way.

The Government pledged to learn lessons from the 2025 disaster, so along came 22 September this year, when sustainable farming incentive funds ran out and the drawbridge got pulled up after less than six hours. I have spoken to hill farmers, protecting some of the world’s most epic landscapes but struggling with dodgy wi-fi in their valley so they got nothing. I have spoken to dairy farmers who just popped out to tend their cattle and got back to their computer to discover that they had got nothing. I have spoken to land agents, heartbroken and ashamed that the majority of small farms that they bid on behalf of had got nothing. There are farmers who had all their basic payment taken away and had literally nothing else to look forward to apart from the SFI, yet the system closed in less than a day and they got nothing. The Government have learnt nothing from the damage the Conservatives did, so will the Minister return with a scheme this autumn that ensures that farmers who had viable SFI applications are funded and not left out in the cold?