Farming on Dartmoor

Debate between Jim Shannon and Geoffrey Cox

Tuesday 18th April 2023 Westminster Hall

[Sir Geoffrey Cox]

It is a highly regrettable situation. My hon. Friends and I have absolutely no argument with the absolute necessary of Natural England fulfilling its statutory objectives—we gave it those legal responsibilities, and they must be fulfilled and enacted—but that can be achieved only in partnership with those who live and work in the area. That means building a positive relationship of trust and confidence. It means achieving, if at all possible, consensus.

My hon. Friends the Members for South West Devon (Sir Gary Streeter) and for Totnes (Anthony Mangnall) and I wrote to the Secretary of State and to my right hon. Friend the Minister. As our letter said, we strongly believe that Natural England on its own in Dartmoor will not be able to achieve the kind of relationship, partnership, co-operation and consensus that will lead to a way forward for the future. We all know that the sites of special scientific interest on Dartmoor are in an unfavourable condition. The farmers know that the moor needs to be brought towards a favourable condition. We can argue, as I said I would avoid, about the causes of that. Many say it is because of overgrazing. It is perfectly true that in the ’80s and ’90s the policies of the European Union, which paid farmers to intensify their livestock numbers because they paid headage subsidies, undoubtedly overgrazed the moor. Many farmers and experts would argue that since that time the dramatic reduction in stocking numbers on Dartmoor, which has been happening since the late 1990s, has caused problems with the consequential burgeoning of molinia purple moor grass, but I do not want to get into that debate today; I want to focus the Government’s mind on how we are to move forward for the future.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I accept that the right hon. and learned Gentleman is focusing on Dartmoor, but he mentioned a human element. Part of that human element is family tenant farms—those who want to hand over their farms to their sons for the future. Surely, with this way forward, Natural England has a big job to do with farming families who have an obligation to their families and to their sons, who want to take over afterwards.

[Sir Geoffrey Cox]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend, if I may be so bold as to call him that. One of the problems with stocking reductions, including the elimination of winter grazing, is that there are many tenants on Dartmoor. They are not landed people; they are tenants. They have no other farms than those they farm on Dartmoor. Where are they to put their flocks if they are told that they must be removed in the winter? What will happen is simple: those flocks will be lost. Either they will be sold if a commercial consideration can be obtained for them or they will be culled, because they may not be wanted anywhere else since they are used to the high moorland and the conditions they live in there.

These flocks are not just any flocks: in many cases they have been there for generations, for decades, for hundreds of years. They are hefted flocks; flocks, in Dartmoor terminology, that hold their leers. Leered flocks, put quite simply, are flocks that instinctively know the boundaries of their own grazing. It is a minor natural marvel of its own. It is part of the social and cultural heritage of Dartmoor, which, if winter grazing is removed completely, will be lost for all time.

My submission to my right hon. Friend the Minister and all Members who have attended the debate is that, as with so many things with life, Dartmoor presents us with a complex balancing exercise in which there are competing public interests to weigh and balance. Of course, the health of the natural environment is a primary consideration, but so I would argue is the cultural and social capital of Dartmoor, its communities and families who have farmed there for centuries—Dartmoor’s own unique heritage. In introducing the grazing calendar for the renewed agreement, we must have regard to that cultural, social and economic capital, which has been built up over the centuries and which is at risk if these destocking or stocking levels are insisted on. That is why my hon. Friends and I have called for an independent process in which, prior to the agreement of the new higher level schemes, an impartial facilitator and reviewer would lead the negotiation and discussion, review the contesting arguments and balance the competing public interests. 

I am glad and relieved to say that the call for an independent process has been heeded by the Dartmoor National Park Authority and the Dartmoor Commoners’ Council. Indeed, every relevant stakeholder on the moor, including Natural England, agreed on 4 April this year that such an independent process would be valuable. I would argue that we are now beginning to make progress. Unless we do something like this—unless we subject the factors that should go into these new extended agreements to objective review—we will constantly have a tug of war on Dartmoor, which will sap our strength and undermine our conviction and singleness of purpose to achieve the objectives we all want to see. I call on the Minister to give a fair wind to this important process.

The proposal is that an independent reviewer be appointed, possibly by the Minister himself, and paid for by the stakeholders at no cost to the Government. Who would look a gift horse in the mouth? The proposal is simple: we appoint an independent facilitator and all parties are brought into the process. He then reports over a period of 12 months, taking the views of all sides and proposing ways forward by negotiation and mediation. That seems to be a positive step forward.

We have been vexed for too long on Dartmoor by these entrenched positions—by the naturalists and environmentalists on one side and the farmers on the other, and by anybody else who wants to weigh in. The time has come for us to work together, and the way forward is via this independent process. Since all parties are now subscribed to it, I urge the Minister to agree. When one is presented with an opportunity like that, one does not spurn it.

My first call to the Minister is to allow the proposal to take place. It may require a degree of co-operation and assistance from the Department. The proposal is that for the first 12 months there would be no or minimal grazing level changes and the stocking calendar would essentially not change. However, the proposal is called “one plus four”, so that after the 12-month review in which the independent facilitator works to achieve consensus, the remaining four years would implement the recommendations of that review.

The park authority supports the proposal, and it is the park authority’s job to balance these factors. Part of its statutory definition and purpose is to achieve a balance between the communities, the socioeconomic factors affecting Dartmoor, the natural landscape and environment, and many other factors besides. If the park authority supports the proposal and Natural England is also in agreement, I urge my right hon. Friend the Minister to give it fair wind. However, it will need more than that. Once the independent facilitator has produced his recommendations, it may be that he makes recommendations for the adjustment of grazing on Dartmoor. The problem with the current situation is that in order to renew these agreements, which must be renewed now, none of the farmers concerned about whether to make adjustments in the business model that they have pursued for many years have any time to do so. The proposal would give time not only for an independent review and for the recommendations of an impartial and credible character to be advanced but, as the process unfolded, for farm businesses on Dartmoor to adapt. In many cases, they are fragile, particularly where there are tenants who have no cushion with which to adapt, but they would at least have the opportunity of planning how, over time, they would adapt to graduated changes, if that was the recommendation for the stocking calendar.

However, the Government can help in this way. It may well be that the grazing of molinia by cattle and ponies is regarded as a good thing, so why are the Government not considering incentivising hill farmers to graze molinia at the correct time—between May and July, when molinia is palatable to cattle? Why are they not producing a scheme for the upland areas that will join in tandem with the statutory objective of bringing these sites into favourable condition by encouraging the practices that will achieve that very thing?

I urge the Minister to have an open mind about how the new environmental land management schemes are being developed for the purposes of the upland areas. It may be that on particular moors there should be an element of bespoke, precise targeting of practices that will assist Natural England, and the families and businesses that farm there, to achieve objectives that we all want to see.

We appreciate that ELMS are experimental schemes. They are still being tried and tested. Although we have seen much welcome detail so far, we have not seen, perhaps, sufficient detail about the upland areas. That presents us with an opportunity over the next 12 months on Dartmoor to design the further detail for the upland areas in a manner that will be tailored to the interests of preserving those precious farms and farming communities, and achieving the objectives of Natural England.

That is my second call to the Government and to my right hon. Friend the Minister: support the independent process, allow it to do its work, and consider how, in designing ELMS for the upland areas, they might be tailored and designed to incentivise and encourage the wholesome objectives of Natural England while preserving viable farm businesses on the moor.

In my opinion and, I believe, in the opinion of my right hon. and hon. Friends who surround me, this is a compelling menu for the Minister to choose from. It achieves what we need to achieve on Dartmoor. I do not want to demonise one side or the other, but there is no doubt that the recent indications and announcements from Natural England have plunged Dartmoor into uncertainty. It would appear from the evidence of my hon. Friends here who represent other moors—indeed, I see across the Chamber others who represent moorland areas—that the same is true elsewhere, but certainly in the south-west, an enormous amount of uncertainty, anxiety and stress has been caused.

It is not just farmers who are experiencing that. Around this country, there are tens of thousands of people who regard with deep sentiment the welfare of Dartmoor and its communities—and also its ponies; we must not forget them. They are genetically unique, and precious to many thousands of people. They, too, are under threat from a policy that would eliminate winter grazing and dramatically reduce summer grazing. Why? Quite simply, it is because they are included in the stocking calendars. Given the choice between a productive unit or an unproductive unit, which will people choose? There is bound to be reduction in the number of Dartmoor ponies, to the extreme dismay of tens of thousands of people throughout this country.

The problem has simply been that Natural England has acted, no doubt with the best intentions, in a manner that fails to take into account that it is regulating a complex environment, in which there are multiple public interests and goods that have to be weighed. That might mean that it has to accept, as I believe it does, that the return to favourable condition of these precious sites, which we all want to see, might take place over time. We cannot simply explode on these fragile communities a sudden change in the models of what they have been doing for decades—the loss of their hefted flocks and all these social and cultural values—because of a single perspective that fails to take account of the complexity of the balance that must be achieved.

Not only have I described the problem, but I hope I have described the solution. Having served under two Prime Ministers in government, I recall that both used to say, “I don’t want problems, Geoffrey, I want solutions.” Faithful to that prescription, I hope I have adumbrated not only a problem that is of acute concern to many hundreds of decent people, whom I and my colleagues represent, that is precious and integral to the survival of their communities and way of life, but the solution, to which they are all subscribed and which, with one heart and voice, we call on the Minister to endorse.

Food and Farming: Devon and Cornwall

Debate between Jim Shannon and Geoffrey Cox

Wednesday 23rd February 2022 Westminster Hall

[Sir Geoffrey Cox (Torridge and West Devon) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered food and farming in Devon and Cornwall.

I am most grateful and delighted to have secured this important debate on food and farming in Devon. It is good to see so many of my colleagues from Devon, and it is very good, if I may say so, to see some honorary Devonians this morning: the hon. Members for Strangford (Jim Shannon) and for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron). It is a particular joy to see them so interested in food and farming in Devon. Of course, many of the themes on which we will touch will be of common interest to those whom they represent and so, speaking for myself and, I am sure, all my colleagues, we are delighted to see them.

I should say straightaway that I own farmland in Devon and derive an income from it. Although I do not myself currently farm the land, it is eligible for some of the schemes that I will discuss today and therefore it is possible that I might benefit from them.

A prosperous and flourishing agriculture in the United Kingdom is in the national interest—I do not imagine that that is a controversial statement in this company. It is not a dispensable or superfluous activity. Recent international events have confirmed, in the most dramatic way, that food production, and more specifically food security, is of increasing national importance and should be a vital Government priority. It does not need much imagination or foresight to see that, for some time now, we have been living through a new and unstable phase of international affairs. The effects of pandemics, wars—threatened and actual—and climate change are thrust upon us with every news bulletin. We cannot take for granted an uninterrupted international supply chain and an endless stream of imports.

On Monday this week, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Defence observed that the impact of a Russian invasion in Ukraine—now already in action—would be to remove access to the breadbasket of the world. It would have the most deleterious impacts upon vulnerable states and nations throughout the world. Similarly, the gradual erosion by climate change of fertile and cultivable areas of the world, increasing regional tensions, confronts us with a growing threat to the interest of this country in ensuring a constant and adequate food supply to its people. Perhaps not for a very long time has it been so critical that our domestic agricultural policies—under our own exclusive control again after 45 years—should be got right. That is no doubt why the Government sensibly included a legal duty on Ministers, in devising the financial support schemes, to have regard to the need to encourage the production of food and to report each five years to Parliament on food security.

However, agriculture in Devon and Cornwall, like farming all over the country, faces a time of great unpredictability and uncertainty. It must adapt to the major implications of the Agriculture Act 2020 and of changes in our trading relationships after our exit from the European Union.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I congratulate the right hon. and learned Gentleman on initiating the debate. It is specifically about food and farming in Devon, but, as he rightly said, when it comes to farming, Northern Ireland is comparable. Does he agree that, while farmers in my constituency and across Northern Ireland have recently had a reported rise in income, their outgoings will far outstrip their income, and that, if any modernisation or diversification is to take place, the Government need to step up and implement funding streams that can be allocated to those who need them most, UK-wide? The right hon. and learned Gentleman and I discussed this before the debate. He and I understand well that our Minister in Northern Ireland has grasped the important issue of farming—I know that the Minister here has done the same—but does he feel that whatever happens in Devon, the same should happen in Strangford?

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Geoffrey Cox]

The panel of wisdom assembled this morning is extraordinary; it is almost as if my hon. Friends have read the speech that I prepared last night. Of course the issue of labour is critical.

I supported the departure of this country from the European Union. I believed in every fibre of my being that the freedoms it would permit our nation, if seized and enacted, would bring great benefits, not only to the farmers of our country but to our country as a whole. I do not believe the people of this country would fail to understand the need of British farming for skilled labour. I do not think that was the objection of the millions who voted for Brexit. They would understand a policy of flexibility.

There is no need for us to maintain, with adamantine stubbornness, a policy that leads to labour shortages in British farming. So I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Newton Abbot (Anne Marie Morris) completely. Nowhere is this uncertainty felt more keenly than in Devon, where 13% of the economy of the county consists of food production, almost twice the national average. No one seriously argued that an area-based direct payment scheme, such as the one we have, should be retained. Agricultural support should be aimed, as far as possible, at those who look after and promote the wellbeing of the land, or who genuinely make their livelihoods from it.

The aims and intentions of the Agriculture Act 2020 were widely supported, including by me, but those direct payments accounted on average for 55% of the total farm incomes of England. In the south-west, even with the farm payments, the farm business survey found that the average income of a lowland grazing farm in 2019 was just £4,048. Without those payments, there would have been a loss of £10,000, or closer to £14,000 if existing agri-environmental payments are included.

Last year, the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board found that the levels of the new environmental land management scheme then published would, even at the advanced tier to which many could not aspire, not remotely replace the current payments. Yet, according to the agricultural transition plan, by 2024 the direct payments will have been reduced by half, and by 2027 they are due to end completely.

The Public Accounts Committee has described the Department’s approach as “blind optimism”. I do not know, but I certainly hope that that is not an accurate description, and I look to the Minister to reassure me. So far, however, no impact assessment has been published of the effects of the design of these new schemes on food production and farming in Devon, or elsewhere. Nor have measurable standards yet been published by which the environmental benefits and farming outcomes can be assessed.

The Minister herself, in answer to a question about upland farming in April 2020, nearly two years ago, said that she understood the need for payment rates to be attractive to achieve the level of uptake and the environmental outcomes we need to see. The Government have suggested—I believe is an accepted and understood figure—that only if we achieve participation in the sustainable farming incentive of around 70% of all farmers can the scheme succeed.

I understand that elements of the new scheme are still under development, but I must tell the Minister that neither the current published rates, nor the schemes as so far defined, are attracting much enthusiasm from the farm businesses and farmers I represent. They simply cannot yet see sufficiently how these schemes will be relevant to the economic survival of their farms. That anecdotal evidence is supported by the growing chorus of concern from the industry. The Tenant Farmers Association, farming one third of the land in England, has described the current plans as

“a complex patchwork of small schemes of limited impact with little which seems to stitch them together.”

The Select Committee on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs—it is a pleasure to see its Chairman, my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish), here this morning—the National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee have all expressed their growing sense of dismay and apprehension. Steadily and relentlessly, the clock is ticking down for Devonshire and Cornish farmers. In the meantime, as the hon. Member for Strangford pointed out, their costs continue to soar.

I understand that in the cockpit of a commercial aircraft coming in to land, sirens and alarms will go off if the plane is approaching the runway either too low or too slow. The sirens are going off now on the Department’s transitional plan. If the market is to play a greater role in farm incomes in the future, it might be less troubling if one could see the necessary vigour and energy invested in creating new markets for British produce around the world—if we could see a bright and bold new vision of a British agricultural export agency with a mission and a passion to convey the magnificent story we have to tell about the quality of British food and to convert it into new opportunities. Perhaps the Minister might say a word about what the Government are doing in this respect.

If Devon and Cornwall’s farmers could sense that the Government were willing to invest in them and back them with the kind of tailor-made and well-designed policies that would lift their collective sales, I have no doubt that they would accept with alacrity the challenge of adaptation, investment and flexibility that these changes will require of them.

[Jim Shannon]

I was watching “Countryfile” on Sunday night, and sugar beet producers in England were mentioned. As we all know, there is an onus on the Minister, but there is also an onus on the companies that buy the product to give farmers the right price for their product. In many cases, the processing company that was mentioned—its name has escaped my mind—has upped its price, but the price has not kept in check with the cost. The right hon. and learned Gentleman is right to press the Minister, but does he agree that we should also press companies to give the producers—the farmers—the right price for their product?

[Sir Geoffrey Cox]

I completely agree that fairness within the supply and the price chain is vital. I think we have lost some momentum that we gathered a few years back with the enactment of various measures that this Government took in trying to create greater awareness of these matters within the industry and the price chain.

The hon. Gentleman has pointed out one further aspect of what I am attempting to convey. What we need is a conviction at the heart of Government of the importance of British farming. I do not doubt that the Minister herself has that conviction. I do not doubt that the Secretary of State, who is a valued colleague of ours in the south-west, has that conviction. I sometimes doubt that, at the centre of the Government’s councils, that conviction is always as persuasive and influential as it should be. I simply say again: at a time when we are confronting another dictator on the borders of Europe, how much more evidence do we need that food security should be a crucial priority at the heart of Government policy making?

If farmers felt that policies were being designed in our post-Brexit world to lift them up and help them make the most of the market, I have no doubt that they would seize those opportunities with alacrity. They were told that regulation would be handled differently and would not, as so often is the case, stifle farmers with bureaucracy and penalisation, but that there would be—I quote from the transition plan—a “new, more effective approach”. Well, someone appears to have forgotten to send the memo to the Environment Agency. Its new guidance on the farming rules for water has caused widespread dismay about the spreading of muck. I understand that dairy farmers are being visited today and told that they must build more storage for their slurry and invest in their farms—investment that they can ill afford at the moment, and even if they can afford it, they are frequently refused planning permission at the instigation of Natural England.

Again and again I hear the same of other agencies like Natural England, whose chief executive I have invited to a summit meeting on Dartmoor later this year to discuss its relationship with working farmers on the moor. We must see this fabled new approach manifested in the everyday experience of farmers. We must take the freedom that our departure from the European Union has conveyed upon us and create the light-touch, unbureaucratic approach for which the farming community is yearning. We must also see the sums promised for investment in on-farm productivity materialise, increase, and be simple to access and draw down.

Perhaps it is too lugubriously pessimistic to remind oneself of the ill-fated Rural Payments Agency and the long history of misery that its performance in administering the area-based payments so often caused those who had to deal with it. Perhaps it is too easy to believe that the administration of these new, as yet undeveloped and unfledged schemes will suffer the same fate in execution as they have appeared to in design. There are more hopeful omens: all is not doom and gloom, as I know the Minister will tell us. The countryside stewardship applications have been simplified, the rates have been increased and—lo and behold—there has been a 30% increase in the uptake of that scheme. Nobody rejoices in that fact more than I, but as the Minister will accept, it is not by itself enough. I hope she will give us this morning greater grounds for hope than, I am afraid, my more pessimistic observation produces at the moment.

This is not just a question of the observable facts. Sometimes one must rely on one’s intuition, and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs so often seems to wear an air of defeatism and lack the foresight, conviction and urgency that the situation demands. If they do not feel they are getting a fair audience at the heart of the councils of government, I understand that. That is why each one of us sitting here this morning can play our part in lending strength to my hon. Friend the Minister’s elbow and that of her boss, the Secretary of State. We stand here at their side, urging them on, willing to play any part—willing to march, to organise and to express solidarity with the team that we send into battle to fight the British farming corner in the Cabinet and the Government. In that fight she can count on my loyal, steadfast support.

I cannot, I am afraid, touch much more on optimistic and encouraging notes, because I must now turn to the topic of pigs. The Minister knows that pig farmers have suffered acutely from the effects of the pandemic. I have had correspondence with the Secretary of State on this pressing issue. The measures taken by the Government have been welcome, but inadequate to prevent a silent catastrophe on pig farms in Devon. Barely a quarter of the 800 visas for butchers have been taken up. The situation on the farms is just as desperate as when I first corresponded with the Minister last year—indeed, more so. One such local farmer has written to me just this week to say that even after culling hundreds of animals,

“we have 2,700 fattening pigs here whereas we would previously only have had 600 weaners and 650 newborn piglets. We have had to make significant investment”—

they have spent over £100,00—

“into adapting buildings to house all these much larger pigs, as well as buying two new bulk bins to store the extra food and also having to install extra feeding equipment. Meanwhile the cost of animal feed has continued to rocket. The financial burden is immense. The stress of this situation is terrible.”

Thus writes a farming family from Langtree, in Torridge in Devon.

Just yesterday the Irish Government followed other Governments, including Northern Ireland and Scotland, by announcing a hardship fund to allow flat-rate payments to farmers who send more than 200 pigs to slaughter each year. The week before last, there was a crisis meeting with the Minister. I would be glad to hear the progress that the Minister is making in this emergency—and it is an emergency.

There is a silent catastrophe going on in pig farms not only in Devon and Cornwall but throughout our country. The issue requires urgent action. The national interest demands that the Government place food security and agriculture in this country at the heart of their policy making. Surely, as the party of the countryside, we cannot stand by while farming—the very sinew of our rural communities—withers away. Of course adaptations to economic circumstances and modern requirements are necessary but, as the uncertainties and perils of world events remind us with acute and ever-growing force, the neglect of our domestic capacity to feed ourselves would be an omission for which the British people will, rightly, not forgive us.