Farming: 25-year Road Map

Lord Swire Excerpts

Monday 28th April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

The land use framework will be critical in a lot of areas. Because we have only a limited amount of land, we have to ensure that we are using it in the best interests of the country, whether that is for supporting farmers and food production, for energy production or for housing and so on. It is important that we are bringing that together. I do not have a date for the noble Lord today, but I assure him that we are actively progressing the report.

[Lord Swire (Con)]

Self-evidently there will be no food security without food, and there will be no food without farmers. What are the Government going to do about the ageing population of farmers and to encourage younger people into farming, at a time when the farming sector has been so horribly undermined by the Government’s own legislation?

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

The average age of farmers has been a problem for many years; there has not been succession planning in the way that perhaps there has for other businesses, because of the nature of farming. We are working closely with the Department for Education on skills. Young people can be encouraged to show an interest from an early age through going to agricultural college, for example, and all these things help. We need to look at how young people can get the right skills to want to go into farming in the first place. It is important that farms are available for new entrants, and that is something that we need to be working on—too many county farms were sold, for example. There is quite a lot of work to be done in this area.