Draft Direct Payments to Farmers (Reductions) (England) Regulations 2023 Draft Agriculture (Financial Assistance) (Amendment) Regulations 2023

Debate between Mark Spencer and Clive Lewis

Tuesday 28th February 2023 General Committees

[Mark Spencer]

I genuinely welcome the Committee’s scrutiny. To be fair to the hon. Member for Cambridge, I also welcome the scrutiny he brings to the role of ELMS and his desire to hold us to account, particularly over the £2.4 billion. That is a manifesto commitment, and he is right to continue to ask whether we are committed to delivering it. I am more than happy to reassure him again that we will deliver that cash. I also welcome his comments about how he wants to see ELMS succeed, bringing environmental and biodiversity benefits, as well as keeping our country well fed.

On the SIs, the hon. Gentleman asked why we have done things the way we have previously and whether this is the final time. The honest truth is that I am the Minister now and I do not think we should keep coming back and talking about the same question. I challenged the team, and we decided to make this the final time. To be fair to previous Ministers, the process has allowed for scrutiny and for the debate to take place annually. Originally, we set out a seven-year plan, and allowing some flexibility in the system and an opportunity to revisit decisions is always sound political practice.

I do not think we have seen a negative impact on land values; if anything, I think the opposite might be true. Land values continue to go up exponentially, and it is probably now beyond the means of most traditional farmers to make a return on land, given the value it seems to attract today. So we have not seen that impact on land values, but what is more interesting is the impact that that might have on rental values going forward, and we will have to monitor that to see what impact some of these changes will have on the rented sector especially.

We are keen to roll the scheme for new entrants out soon, and it will not be long before the hon. Gentleman sees the details of that. If ever there was a moment when we wanted to see the brightest and best young people coming into our sector, this is it. Encouraging new entrants into agriculture, farming and food production is the right thing to do. It has always been difficult, but somehow people have managed to defy economic gravity and enter UK agriculture. In the ’30s and ’40s that was traditionally through dairy farming. We then saw a change to outdoor pigs and poultry. Now we are seeing a lot of people getting into food production through flying flocks. Given some of the changes that ELMS are bringing—with overwintered stubbles and cover crops—we are seeing real opportunities for people to set up flying sheep flocks to graze off those cover crops in the spring. That is another great opportunity for people moving forward.

As we move into these new schemes, we will transfer all that cash from one pot into the other. That is the right thing to do. We must take people on this journey at time and a speed that they can cope with, and I think we are pitching that just about right. That goes to some of the comments from my right hon. Friend the Member for North West Hampshire. We are moving in that direction and giving people the chance to readjust.

My right hon. Friend mentioned hedgerows. They are a really good example of where we can have a very positive impact. There are quite generous capital grants available to people through countryside stewardship to put in new hedgerows. The SFI standards also allow people to monitor and log the quality of their own hedgerows, so that they can improve them and change the way they manage them.

[Clive Lewis (Norwich South) (Lab)]

I want to pick up on the point the right hon. Member for North West Hampshire made about an army of people in high-vis holding clipboards. One issue that has been raised with the Environmental Audit Committee in our food security inquiry is that enforcement may be an issue, and we were wondering what extra support and resource would go into the enforcement side. If the payments go to farmers, people could be paid but not actually do the work on hedgerows and sustainability. I would be grateful for more information on that.

[Mark Spencer]

I was just coming to that, because it is a really important point to land, so I am grateful for the two interventions that have given me opportunity to do that. We want to move in a direction that is much less about enforcement and catching people out and more about supporting and encouraging people to do the right thing. Instead of inspectors, we will have assistants and people going on to farms to advise and support. People will not be turning up with a tape measure and saying, “Aha! You’re 50 cm short on that margin.” Rather, they will be saying, “This is what you need to do, and this is how it needs to work.” We want to help and support people to move in the right direction.

There is another side to that. With modern technology it is possible to monitor things via satellite. We can see cropping and improvements to hedgerows via satellites. If individuals take the mickey, do not do the right thing and try to commit fraud, we will of course go after them and prosecute them for defrauding the taxpayer. We aim to support the people who want to do the right thing, while penalising the very small number of people who want to take the mickey.

My right hon. Friend the Member for North West Hampshire made a point about pest management and the use of pesticides on a crop. The purpose of pest management buffer strips is to encourage the production and growth of natural insecticides—in other words ladybirds, lacewings and predators that will go and eat aphids, which are the pests we want to get rid of. We are encouraging people not to use insecticides. They can still use herbicides and fungicides, but they cannot use insecticides, which are the chemicals that will kill those ladybirds and lacewings. I accept that there may be a time where a farmer, having committed to not using insecticide, has to backtrack on that agreement because of a huge aphid infestation. They would have to make a commercial decision as to whether they wanted to stick to receiving taxpayers’ money for not using insecticides or wanted to backtrack on that, use insecticide and not receive payment for that crop.