Rural Landlords and Land Letting: Reform

Lord Inglewood Excerpts

Thursday 21st January 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Inglewood (Non-Afl) [V]]

My Lords, I declare my landowning and farming interests and my other declarations in the register and join the noble Lord, Lord Clark of Windermere, as a fellow Cumbrian and chairman of the Cumbria LEP, in respect of his comments about Newton Rigg College.

The recent debates on the Agriculture Act 2020 in your Lordships’ House showed the interest in and the disagreements about the future of agriculture, otherwise known as rural England. Changes are afoot across the land. For the past two or three generations, buttressed by town and country planning legislation, the countryside has been almost exclusively a focus for farming and forestry. We need to be clear that upland and lowland farming and animal and arable farming are different. Indeed, in some ways, forestry is a form of arable farming. Living we do as in a country where the landlord and tenant system is prevalent in all kinds of different forms across all urban and rural Britain, how then should arrangements work, especially at a time of change?

Too much current discussion is focused on today and the existing legislation when a new look is required right across the piece. I believe that ad hoc tinkering is likely to lead to muddle and injustice. What is the role of contract and what is the role of legislation, be it hard or soft law? Everyone knows that change always costs money, but agriculture’s economics have been battered and the national finances are under the cosh. We have to be clear that working capital must be retained in the sector because, if it is not, constructive change will be paralysed. This is why, as the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, said, the long-standing ideas of the CLA about the rural business unit have found their time. It is completely self-evident that bringing about change needs a complementary tax regime that does not haemorrhage working capital from the sector.