My Lords, I draw attention to my interests as a dairy farmer; landowner; forester; natural capital, residential and renewables developer; and investor in natural capital businesses Cecil, Circular FX and Agricarbon and other farming-related businesses such as Deere, SLC Agricola and Anglo-Eastern Plantations. I am most grateful to my parliamentary party for making the plight of farmers and rural communities a top priority and allowing time for this debate today.
The list of negative spending and taxation decisions by this Government on farming and rural communities is long. The cumulative impact is devastating on the financial and mental well-being of farmers in particular but also the wider rural community. The reduction in inheritance tax reliefs under agricultural property relief and business property relief remains a hugely emotive and damaging subject. We remain puzzled why this was necessary, given that the Treasury expects to raise only £500 million per annum, and it will be only a transitory gain as tax-planning options remain open to reduce or eliminate this exposure, as Government Ministers have themselves conceded.
A small cohort of currently elderly farmers, sufferers of serious illness or victims of mortal accident will be caught by this capricious decision. There is a high risk that those who reasonably assume that they would not live either for the seven years needed to time out potentially exempt transactions, or even the four and a half years until the next election, will take the timing and manner of their death into their own hands. I have asked repeatedly whether the Government will keep and publish timely data on suicides by farmers and family business owners in the run-up to the reduction of these reliefs and have received a negative response each time. Will the Minister review this denial?
It seems particularly cruel that the £10 million mental health support fund for farmers has been shelved, despite the noble Lord, Lord Livermore, suggesting that mental health support is there for farmers should they consider taking control of the timing of their deaths. The massive reduction in delinked payments, which will be subject to a regret Motion later this month, as well as the abrupt closure of the sustainable farming incentive scheme, leaves many farmers in a dreadful position. Those who were trapped in the long-term higher-level or Countryside Stewardship schemes and unable to access sustainable farming incentives are hit with the delinked payment reduction without any offset. Those who were counting on new SFI income this year to replace old schemes that had ended are even harder hit. This does not appear to be a way to run a Government, whereby decisions are made that lead to considerable unfairness in outcomes and the unlucky lose financial viability.
In answer to my Written Question, the Minister replied:
“We remain committed to investing £5 billion of funding in the farming budget this year and next … We are on track to spend all the funding that is available”.
I look forward to this debate and thank the noble Lord, Lord Roborough, for introducing the issues that clearly need to be addressed. I look forward to my noble friend’s response. I am a sort of bookend in this event. I have come as much to listen and learn as to provide definitive information.
I am not a farmer—my father decided that he did not wish to take over the family farm; he was a qualified chemist—but, because of that farm, to a limited extent I feel I have a sense of the cultural hold of being from a farming background. I still occasionally visit the land that was ours and feel a sense of attachment—so I get that. It is important that government policies recognise the cultural content of farming and agriculture. In general, however, what we need are economic and planning decisions that support farming practices that deliver benefits for food production, biodiversity and climate resilience, while at the same time maintaining the countryside that we all know and love.
I thank various organisations and the Library for their helpful briefings. They include the Nature Friendly Farming Network, the World Wide Fund for Nature UK and the Campaign to Protect Rural England. I assume that there are parallel organisations in the other nations of the UK. They all emphasise the vital role of public funding, planning and infrastructure in creating and maintaining thriving rural landscapes while meeting our shared environmental goals and, not least, in achieving a successful and thriving agricultural industry.
In introducing the debate the noble Lord, Lord Roborough, outlined a number of major concerns, including the compulsory purchase of land to meet our housing targets. Clearly, this has to be undertaken in a way that does not work against the general objectives that I laid out. The issue of what should be paid for land—the enhanced market value with planning permission for housing, or its value as agricultural land—is important and I fully support the Government’s approach to that.
My Lords, I too am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Roborough, for securing this debate and for his excellent opening speech. I declare my interests as president of the Rural Coalition and a vice-president of the Local Government Association.
I have already spoken in your Lordships’ House on changes to the agricultural property relief and business property relief, so my views are already recorded in Hansard. I lament the sudden closure of the sustainable farming incentive, and the reforms to compulsory purchase in the Planning and Infrastructure Bill.
If your Lordships’ House will indulge me, I want to focus on two associated areas which are pertinent to this whole debate. First, the rural economy has great potential to contribute to the economic growth that is needed. I think we all believe in this; it is just a matter of how we achieve it. Secondly, I will make a few comments about the almost complete lack of strategic rural policy or effective rural-proofing in government decision-making.
It is very easy for us to sit here and talk about the things we do not like—we spend a great deal of time doing that—but I am proud to be president of the Rural Coalition, which has tried to work alongside government over many years to put some positive ideas, initiatives and facts and figures on the table to help us achieve the growth in the rural economy that we believe we need.
I want to mention the Pragmatix report that we commissioned, and which some noble Lords will have read, entitled Reigniting Rural Futures.This report evidences the extraordinarily large productivity gap between rural and urban areas and the billions of pounds that are lost through chronic underinvestment in rural infrastructure and services. We made an economic case that, with the right policies in place, the rural economy could contribute up to an additional £19 billion in tax revenue for the Treasury. That would, of course, mean addressing the digital divide, rural transport, access to banking services, the rural affordable housing crisis and fair funding for rural local authorities. Yet none of His Majesty’s Government’s policies in these areas mentions or accounts for the needs of rural communities.
My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Roborough on calling this debate. It is, as ever, a pleasure to follow the right reverend Prelate, who brings a depth of knowledge and experience to this subject.
It is right that the Government be held to account for the seemingly reckless way in which they are dealing with the farming industry and rural communities. As the right reverend Prelate said, they are home to nearly one-quarter of our population. The other issue I wish to raise is the danger to our food security at this unprecedented moment for global trade.
The Labour manifesto promised to champion British farming. Instead, from the farmer’s point of view and the point of view of rural communities, Labour seems to have launched a series of crippling blows on farming, starting with the Budget changes to inheritance tax for farmers. That is going to cripple British farming and prevent investment and growth in the rural communities.
The noble Lord, Lord Davies, raised a really interesting point about assets and their taxation. I certainly believe that the so-called assets of land, machinery and livestock are not an indication of farmers’ wealth but the essentially means for them to earn a living. You cannot have a farmer without him owning or renting land. They care for 70% of our countryside and grow 60% of our food, as has already been mentioned in the debate.
I do not want to blame the Minister; I never do. She and I know where the real culprit lies, but the effect for farming and the rural community is the same. The latest bombshell was dropped on 11 March this year, with 30 minutes’ notice, announcing that the sustainable farming initiative was closed to new applications. This was at a moment when many farmers were still preparing their applications, having been assured by Defra that if there was to be any change in the procedure, six weeks’ notice would be given—another broken commitment.
My Lords, it is a particular pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard, and to very much agree with what she said about food security. I congratulate my noble friend Lord Roborough on securing this debate.
Underpinning what the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard, said about the need for food security is the need to see a clearer strategy for our countryside, our farmers and our rural communities. We have seen none of that so far since this Government took office, and we desperately need it right now because, as the Chancellor rightly said last week—one of the few sensible things she has said recently—the world has changed. We cannot be certain that we will always be able to import all the food that we need. We cannot be certain that we will not see a further period of geopolitical instability. Therefore, the need to protect in particular our most productive land in this country is of paramount importance.
Right now, we are trying to grow our food, generate our electricity, protect our nature and build our houses all in the same land spaces. We cannot do it in a haphazard way; it has to be done carefully, strategically and thoughtfully. So the first thing I say to the Minister is: please can she and her colleagues in government work this through in a much more careful way than has happened up to now? There are some very practical examples. We should not, for example, be building solar farms on our most productive agricultural land. There is clearly a place for solar power in this country, and there is a lot of land that is of second-degree or third-degree usefulness, where there is a genuine opportunity to do more with it. But we should not use our most productive land for this purpose.
Likewise, there is a need to build more housing, but the easy option for housing development is always just to build new houses on greenfields, which is by far the easiest option for developers—but we should not be taking the easy option. There are plenty of avenues in this country for us to pursue smarter urban development. It is a matter of great regret to me that this Government do not seem to believe in urban development as a core part of meeting the housing needs of the future. The targets for our big city areas have not risen in anything like the same way as the rural areas, the areas on the fringes of our cities and the areas of green-belt land. I saw this in my former constituency, where there is a real opportunity to build on brownfield land and to densify the developments already there—not just to build on the green spaces.
My Lords, I join other noble Lords in congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Roborough, on securing this important debate and on the very informative way in which he introduced it. I do not come from a farming or rural background, but the territorial designation that attends my peerage is a small hamlet in Mid Devon, Loxbeare, where my father-in-law is a sheep farmer. Over the past 35 years, I have come to understand in some way the powerful communities that exist in these small farming areas, and I have come to greatly respect them.
His Majesty’s Government have a range of economic policies, and they will inevitably impact all parts of the country, including rural areas. But the impact of policy on health outcomes, and population health outcomes in particular, is frequently neglected. We know that in rural communities, health outcomes differ. There is an assumption that because the countryside is beautiful and people can get out and about, they will in general be healthier and live longer. But there are substantial disparities in outcomes. We have heard of the higher suicide rate experienced in farming communities in comparison with many urban communities, but there are also disparities in other health outcomes and, importantly, there are inequalities in access to healthcare facilities.
For instance, 51% of rural populations live over an hour’s travel distance from their closest hospital, compared with only 8% of urban populations. Some 43% of rural populations are within half an hour’s walk of a general practice or primary care facility, compared with some 95% of urban populations. So there is inequality of access. Ambulance waiting times can be longer; pharmacies are more sparsely distributed; and, most importantly, dispensing pharmacies in rural locations frequently have less stock of medicinal products, so individuals have to travel much longer distances to get their medicines. These are all important problems with regard to access.
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Roborough for having introduced this debate. His eloquent speech at the start was full of detail and excellent suggestions on how things could be better if the Government listened. I try not to get too political in these debates, but I am conscious that, while the Minister is from a very rural area—a magnificent part of the country—it is worth noting that all the Commons Ministers represent urban areas. That is why I feel that there has been a lack of consideration and true understanding of some of the impact of recent decisions that have been made on the farming community but on rural communities too.
There is often an assumption that rural communities are wealthy, but that is simply not the case. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans talked about rural strategy. A couple of years ago, the previous Government produced something called Unleashing Rural Opportunity. It was the one time I was able to get a map into a particular document showing that contrast and challenging other Ministers at the time but also the country as a whole to see how stark the variation is.
So what can be done? Unfortunately, confidence is now trashed by not only the actions but by the proposals to be made—particularly in the Planning and Infrastructure Bill. I am sure that we will debate it at length when it arrives in this place, but I hope noble Lords understand quite how bad this has got. When we think about the relationship—the unfortunately regrettable relationship—that Natural England has with a lot of our farming community, for it to be given powers to compulsorily purchase land means not only putting it in the wrong hands, because, if anything, it should be done by the Secretary of State, potentially delegating, but it completely destroys the nature markets framework and the approach of bringing private finance into the sector. Just last week, Steve Reed, the Defra Secretary, was right to praise the standard that has come out to open up this market, building on work from two years ago. It is great that we have finally got there, but the Government do not see the irony that giving powers such as this begs the question of why farmers should be bothered to get involved now in the first place.
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow my noble friend. The House is enriched by the knowledge and experience that she brings to your Lordships’ Chamber. I declare my farming and land management interests in Wales and congratulate my noble friend Lord Roborough on securing this crucial debate.
Since the general election, we have seen policy decisions that have actively harmed the agricultural sector, undermined rural prosperity and jeopardised our nation’s food security. The Government’s election platform promised to support farmers and stimulate rural economic growth; instead, their policies have betrayed those commitments, leaving many farming businesses struggling to survive. A prime example of this is the sudden and shocking closure of the sustainable farming incentive. That move, made without consultation or warning, has left thousands of farmers in limbo. Many were in the midst of applications, investing time and resources into what was meant to be a stable scheme. Now they find themselves excluded, with no viable alternative, forced to return to more intensive farming methods—in direct contradiction of the UK’s environmental goals.
Take, for example, Richard, a dairy farmer from Cumbria. He had spent months preparing his SFI application, carefully planning to transition his farm to more sustainable practices. When the scheme was abruptly closed, he was left with no support and his business is now at risk of collapse. He may have no option but to sell off part of his herd just to survive.
The Country Land and Business Association, alongside CBI Economics, has provided alarming projections that the changes to APR and BPR could shrink UK gross value added by nearly £15 billion by 2030, eliminate more than 208,000 jobs and, paradoxically, reduce tax receipts by almost £1.9 billion. For individual farming businesses, this means an average loss of nearly 10% of turnover, a 15% drop in investment and an 8% reduction in staff. These are not mere numbers; they represent family-run farms being forced out of business, young farmers unable to inherit land and a bleak future for British agriculture.
1:33 pm
20 of 53 shown
This seems hard to square, given that the National Farmers’ Union estimates that £400 million was saved by the steep reduction in delinked payments, yet only a few months later SFIs are cut off at a moment’s notice. Evidence given to the EFRA Committee by Defra Ministers and officials appeared to suggest a deliberate intention to ignore the six weeks’ guidance. Can the Minister also assure us that the £200 million investment in the Animal and Plant Health Agency’s Weybridge laboratory is not coming out of the farming budget? I wonder whether she is also able to tell us how much of that farming budget actually ends up in the hands of farmers, not in administration or projects run by others, and not in infrastructure nor arm’s-length bodies.
The £100 million rural service delivery grant being redirected to deprived urban areas, despite the widespread rural issues and the higher cost of living in rural areas, perhaps signals where this Government’s focus is. Farmers are having to contend with these capricious decisions and their often life-changing impacts while also dealing with massive inflationary pressures, low grain prices and increases in employers’ national insurance contributions and minimum wages. It has been suggested by the Government that the new SFIs that are planned are likely to require the land use framework to have been published. The Minister has indicated in a reply to my Written Question that
“the publication of the Land Use Framework”
will be
“this year. A timeline for publishing the Land Use Framework will be set out in due course”.
Could she confirm whether the publication of that framework will be necessary prior to the publication of new SFIs and what that might mean for their timing? A department official has suggested in front of the EFRA Committee that details of future SFIs would be with us in July. Can she confirm that?
The second prong of the attack on farmers and the rural community comes from planning, whether by displacing agricultural production on prime agricultural land with solar farms and other energy infrastructure, or the enhanced compulsory purchase order powers in the Planning and Infrastructure Bill. We on these Benches are broadly supportive of the Government’s housing ambitions, but there is no reason why they need to come at the expense of the rural community.
Land-owning farmers are threatened with compulsory purchase of their land at values that do not represent market value, as the value of alternative uses will be disregarded. Taking part of a holding often undermines the viability of the whole and, while the price paid may reflect the agricultural value, that is unlikely to be enough to replace that land locally—even if such land is available. It is hard to understand what is wrong with the current valuation framework that ensures fair payment for land. It is also hard to understand how this can be consistent with the ECHR on confiscation, as the Government claim on the face of the Bill.
Further to this, the role of Natural England becomes terrifying. As drafted, the Bill confers enormous powers on Natural England to CPO whichever land it chooses to fulfil its environmental delivery plans. Why does Natural England need these powers? Why can it not simply offer to pay landowners to carry out the work or deliver the services that are intended in these EDPs? Surely, there is a choice of sites where such work can be undertaken and that can introduce competition in service delivery while allowing value to be delivered in the EDPs. I fail to understand how nature restoration levies can possibly be well used by Natural England to CPO land as it sees fit. It has not been necessary to nationalise sites of special scientific interest to protect them. Just how large should we expect these nature restoration levies to be?
We on these Benches fundamentally believe in reducing the size of the state. However, capricious short-term spending and taxation decisions are not the way to do it. We want to see a vibrant rural economy, financed by fair payment for the public goods being delivered, as well as the traditional food and timber outputs from rural land. We see numerous ways of delivering this—but without killing the patient before the cure is administered by withdrawing funding before a replacement is available.
When will the Government make a decision on the inclusion of woodland carbon units in the emissions trading scheme? The noble Baroness has previously said “in due course”, but the consultation was launched last summer and surely cannot be very complex. The additional financial incentives would encourage new tree planting to meet and even exceed targets. Our climate is perfect for healthy, vigorous establishment and growth in trees. Our target of 16.5% tree cover, as I have previously said from the Back Benches, is unambitious, and our progress even to that is very disappointing. Trees capture significant quantities of atmospheric carbon, replace high-carbon emissions materials in building, reduce peak flow rates in flood events, help to purify water and benefit biodiversity. Surely, we must do everything in our power to increase this tree cover. The Government’s own chief executive officer of the Forestry Commission, Richard Stanford, eloquently explained these benefits to the APPG on Forestry and Timber Security, as did the Woodland Trust team to the APPG on Woods and Trees.
When can we expect mechanisms to allow water companies to pay for the flood mitigation and water quality improvements that regenerative farming, peatland restoration and new woodland planting deliver? When will action be taken to solidify the strong position of the woodland carbon code and the peatland carbon code by certifying them under the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market? How will the Minister incentivise the private sector to pay for nature restoration and biodiversity protection and improvement? Surely the planning Bill is a golden opportunity to move forward on this, beyond our own biodiversity net gain measures on a larger scale. Why are we squandering this opportunity by giving it to Natural England? Would the Government consider tax incentives to encourage private investment in nature restoration, or even changing the rules on bidding for government contracts to require companies to invest in it?
Farmers and the wider rural community deliver unquantifiable value to our country; feeding us, protecting and restoring nature, sequestering carbon, growing timber to displace the 73% that is currently imported, protecting our archaeology, looking after our fresh water, maintaining our countryside for access and removing litter. Most of these public goods are not paid for at anything like their true value—if at all. This is simply not sustainable for the rural community. For the farming and rural community to move forward with confidence, existing spending commitments cannot be changed overnight and random new taxes imposed. The rural community needs confidence that this Government are committed to ensuring that these public goods will be paid for. I very much look forward to the insights of all other noble Lords in this debate and the Minister’s response. I beg to move.
The most contentious issue has been the inheritance tax reforms. In any debate on this issue, you have to recognise that the problem has been created by the inheritance tax system. In general principle, I see no reason why particular groups should be absolved from their responsibility to pay part of their wealth following their death, to the general good. I support the concept of inheritance tax, and I do not see any reason in principle why the agricultural industry should be exempt. However, going back to the point I made earlier, the cultural significance of the family farm is a real factor and any changes we undertake have to recognise that.
Those who have read the financial pages over many years will know that there is a general view that inheritance tax is a voluntary tax and, in order to avoid it, you have to make changes to the way history and tradition have required farmers to behave. That will take time to adjust to, but we have asked many other communities to make cultural changes, and I see no reason why farmers should be exempt from that objective.
I support the Government’s farming initiatives, and I look forward to the publication later in the year—I hope my noble friend will cover this—of the 25-year farming road map. I look forward to hearing other speakers.
Despite 1,254 respondents to the question about rural affordable housing in the NPPF consultation, the Government have provided no guidance on the delivery of affordable housing in rural communities. The Planning and Infrastructure Bill also misses the opportunity to implement changes to help deliver small rural housing sites. The Bus Services (No. 2) Bill, which contains many good provisions and for which I am very grateful, needs to implement cross-subsidy between rural and urban areas to account for the additional costs generated by sparsity.
This year’s local government funding settlement once again leaves rural local government underfunded, with urban areas receiving 40% more per head in government funding spending power than their rural counterparts. This comes on top of the additional costs of delivering services due to sparsity. I urge His Majesty’s Government to address these issues in their review of the funding formula, to recognise that density of deprivation is not the only factor that affects the costs of service delivery, and to level per capita spending power across rural and urban authorities.
The word “rural” is not mentioned once in the industrial strategy Green Paper. From a series of Written Answers, I can only conclude that the rural industry is not really being considered in the Government’s drive for growth. What a waste. The Government urgently need—indeed, it is vital—to develop a coherent rural strategy and ensure that all policies across the board account for and involve rural communities. If these communities are left behind again—20% of the population live in rural areas and over 500,000 businesses are registered there—we will all be the poorer for it and the entire nation will lose out.
The SFI was launched in 2017. It had all-party support. Its purpose was to help farmers transition from straight subsidies to grants for introducing more sustainable methods. In 2022, Daniel Zeichner MP—then shadow Minister for Agriculture—castigated the then Government for dragging their feet, demanding a commitment to long-term funding for it and a guarantee that goalposts would not be moved. Daniel Zeichner MP is now the Minister for Agriculture in the other place, and I am not sure what he is saying now. Have the Government scrapped the SFI? Do they intend to? If so, what is to replace it?
I hope the Minister will be able to enlighten us on that and, in particular, on how the Government plan to support our agricultural productivity and resilience when climate change, environmental insecurity, geopolitical events and now in particular tariffs make the whole issue of our food security a major concern. On the day after “liberation day”, will she be able to explain to noble Lords how her Government propose to deal with tariffs if, as seems likely, they will affect agriculture? Was Nigel Farage MP telling us something when he said last week that he welcomed the import of chlorinated chicken?
If the Government are planning for such eventualities, why, by their taxation and other policies already raised by noble Lords, are they reducing farm incomes, prosperity and growth in our rural communities? They should be supporting the vital stability of our food security, not diminishing it. I hope the Minister can reassure the House. She always listens carefully and takes note of the argument. Dare I wish her a happy Easter?
There is also the very important task of restoring our biodiversity, which I believe the current Government, like the last one, want. We have to be smart about how we do that as well. There are disappointments in the Government’s approach to our farmers. The previous Government were right—although they did not get the detail right—to try to empower our farmers to do more to protect the countryside of which they are stewards. I do not see the way in which the current Government are approaching things such as the SFI as reflecting an understanding of the role that farmers can play. There really has to be a more holistic, more strategic and more thoughtful approach to how all this happens.
I will make one point in particular to the Minister. It drives to the heart of the question of how planning goes forward in our rural areas, whether it is about housing or onshore wind—I am not a great fan of onshore wind, but the Government have taken the decision to pursue it—and how all that fits with the challenge of restoring biodiversity. It is the issue of corridors for nature. We have to understand that whether it is wildlife on the ground or birds in the air, putting development in the wrong places has a materially negative impact on nature’s ability to recover. So my final point is: as the Minister works with her colleagues in MHCLG and across government, as they set guidance for local authorities and as they put in place all the different measures they are looking at to drive growth in energy and housing, it is of paramount importance that they also reflect the realities of local nature recovery. If we do these things in the wrong places—if we erect wind farms in the middle of bird migratory routes or if we build housing estates in the middle of migratory routes for species on the ground—we will go backwards, not forwards. What we need from this Government is a holistic strategy. So far, sadly, we have not seen it. I hope the Minister can deliver it pretty soon.
There are also concerns about accessing clinical services in acute situations. The time from onset of symptoms to intervention for patients with acute myocardial infraction and acute stroke is critical in terms of achieving the best clinical outcomes—yet frequently patients in rural locations experiencing those conditions have to wait longer to achieve those interventions. This problem extends to management of chronic conditions, particularly troublesome when there are long distances to travel for those who, for instance, receive daily fractions of radiotherapy to manage their cancers.
All this suggests that there must be a very clear focus in terms of planning considerations, when taking forward economic and other policies, to ensure that we can achieve equitable outcomes for those living in rural locations, as we do for those living in urban locations, with regard to the provision of healthcare. We are about to experience a major reorganisation of the NHS in England. The Government have set three clear priorities: a move from hospital to community care; a move from analogue to digital care; and a move from treatment to prevention. But for all those transformations to apply equitably in rural as well as urban locations, there needs to be very careful consideration of the specific needs in rural locations to achieve those policy objectives.
Can the Minister confirm that, in taking forward and understanding an assessment of the impact of various policies—economic, planning and other—with regard to impacts in rural communities, or for rural communities, there will be proper consideration of the impact on achieving health outcomes? Most important, in terms of economic policy, is the impact on the social determinants of health—housing, education, jobs and so on—which are the most important determinants of the health outcomes for those communities.
When we come to debate the SI in a couple of weeks’ time, after the Recess, we can get more into how the money is being spent—and I am conscious that, with the change in paying farmers away from the guaranteed fixed payments there was always going to be a sort of see-saw when that moved over. People might not initially take up the proposals but they would understand, learn and commit—and we have seen the huge level of commitment. I genuinely hope that farmers are making complaints to the department, because I believe that serious maladministration has been done by pulling the plug against an expectation—and not by going through judicial review but by going straight to the department and the ombudsman.
We need farmers. We need landowners and rural communities to help not just with food production but with the future of our planet. It is about the topsy-turvy difficulties with which they are living—and our farmers are the original friends of the earth. Yes, there have been some really poor farming practices, which we have later recognised, which have now been changed. But we need to bring those people with us.
On one other point that I wanted to make, on housing, I am concerned about the proposal to adjust some of the planning decisions. Noble Lords will find that most councils are not nimbys, but when they are faced with an 82% increase for housing in east Suffolk and no changes in London, where the housing demand is really strong, that will put pressure on not just the fields but the villages and those small communities. By the way, at the same time, housing associations are flogging off the houses in those villages so that they can release capital to build more houses, they say, but they are doing that 60, 70 or 80 miles away—very close to the new areas of growth. It is just ridiculous.
There are other things that worry me about council officers taking decisions, when local plans have already set the housing densities and all of a sudden developers come along and say that they do not want to build at that density any more. What councillors and Ministers are not realising is that as a consequence even existing targets are going to take two or three times the amount of land to build the houses that are already there—so just imagine now being expected to double it.
We are in a difficult time, and I know that the Minister is very much a champion of rural areas. I genuinely hope that she can persuade the rest of the Government to be so too.
Emily, a young farmer from Yorkshire, had been preparing to take over her family’s arable farm, but the proposed changes to APR and BPR mean she now fears that inheritance tax will make it financially impossible. She said her family has worked the land for generations, but this may be the last. The Government say they would support her, but their policies say otherwise. The Government remain silent on this disaster, refusing even to open a consultation on these damaging changes. That is unacceptable—the Government must engage with industry stakeholders to find a fairer approach, such as a clawback mechanism, that does not threaten the survival of farming businesses across the country.
The healthcare perspective on this debate, which we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Kakkar, was fascinating. It is often absent when discussing rural issues.
Several noble Lords have mentioned housing. Rural Britain is in the grip of a housing crisis, with young people unable to afford homes in the communities in which they grew up. Small-scale development could address this crisis while supporting local economies. Instead, as my noble friend Lord Grayling outlined, the Government’s proposals focus on empowering combined authorities to develop vast urban projects, while failing to equip local councils with the resources they need to approve modest, essential rural housing. Furthermore, the reforms inexplicably excluded national parks, further isolating these communities from economic opportunity.
The message from rural Britain is clear: this Government’s policies are failing it. What good is a 25-year plan if you do not know how you will survive the next six months? The farming community is being taxed into oblivion, environmental goals are being undermined and economic growth is being suffocated by bureaucratic inertia. If the Government are serious about their rural commitments, they must take immediate action—reinstate the sustainable farming incentive, rethink inheritance tax relief changes, introduce fairer planning policies and protect farmers from unjust compulsory purchase powers.
Our farmers and rural communities are the backbone of this country. They deserve better. I urge the Government to listen, consult and act before it is too late.