Single Payment Scheme

Rory Stewart Excerpts

Wednesday 8th June 2011 Westminster Hall

[Rory Stewart (Penrith and The Border) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) on securing this debate and on all his work for farmers in Staffordshire and more generally throughout Britain. I shall speak briefly, and begin by saying that the issue is enormously important, as my hon. Friend has emphasised. Not only does it make all the difference to lifestyles, to communities and to preserving farms through price volatility, but it is a good long-term bet in terms of food security.

--- Later in debate ---

On resuming—

[Rory Stewart]

I have little to add to the brilliant exposition by my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford of why single farm payments are so vital to everybody. We see that every day in Cumbria, where such payments are vital for the support of our hill farms; in some areas, about 93% of farms would go bust if they did not receive the single farm payment. The entire agricultural economy depends on those payments and, as my hon. Friend suggested, they stretch into every area including the governance of agricultural colleges. The fight in my constituency is to protect Newton Rigg, our agricultural college, from having its assets stripped in a takeover.

I do not need to emphasise the problems faced by all farmers. There is no need to talk today about the horrors of the Rural Payments Agency, but all strength to the arm of the Minister for the steps that he has taken to sort it out. The system is totally unacceptable and debilitating for so many of our farmers.

[Mel Stride]

On the RPA, farmers in my constituency constantly complain about bureaucracy and red tape. Does my hon. Friend welcome Richard Macdonald’s recent review on cutting red tape and its 200 recommendations, and will he urge the Government—as I will—to take up those recommendations with some vigour?

[Rory Stewart]

Absolutely. The second area connected with red tape is, of course, the effects of these environmental schemes. Whether we are talking about cross-compliance or stewardship schemes, we exist in a world often of craziness, of indigestible tufts of grass emerging, of self-seeding oak plantations that never self-seed and of floodplains that never flood, because of a lack of local flexibility, so I again congratulate the Minister on pushing for more local flexibility. However, the short point that I wish to make is about our diplomatic initiative.

The really big game in the end is not the red tape; it is ensuring that we get 2013 right, that we team up with the right partners in Europe, that we are there with the Germans, that we understand the French position and that we are winning that diplomatic fight. That will not be done just by the NFU or by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs; it will be done by the Foreign Office. We must invest in our embassies. We must invest in ensuring that the European countries are not ahead of us in that game—in ensuring that we get the best deal possible for British farmers through diplomatic enterprise in Europe.

[Mr William Cash (Stone) (Con)]

I endorse what I have heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart).I also very much approve of the line that my right hon. Friend the Minister has been taking on agriculture. We must ensure that we get the kind of farming that is needed. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) on his approach to the matter. To add one other note, I want to ask my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border whether he thinks that it is important that the badger population is kept properly under control, because that is vital in areas such as my own.

[Rory Stewart]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. It is vital that we deal with tuberculosis. We have just had our first incident in Penrith and The Border—a shocking incident. Much of it seems to be about the movement of cows from areas that are already TB-infected. That infection then can get into the badger population. Any measures, including proper control of badgers, must be taken. TB in our cows is completely unacceptable.