Land Use Change: Food Security

[DR Andrew Murrison in the Chair]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the impact of land use change on food security.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Murrison. I am grateful for the chance to raise this issue, which goes to the heart of our national interest. When I submitted my bid for the debate, little did I know that it would take place on a day on which there were members of the farming community out on Parliament Square with their tractors, with what we called a muck spreader where I was brought up, on a farm, but others might call a slurry tanker, and even with livestock. That is testament to the determination of the farming community to make sure their voice continues to be heard in this place.

In simple terms, this debate is about what we choose to do with the land beneath our feet. If we keep tarmacking and concreting over our fields, we should not be surprised if one day we find ourselves asking a basic question: “Where is our food going to come from?” We must not become a country that produces some of the finest produce in the world, to the highest standard, and yet becomes dependent on imports of lower grade, substandard produce. Domestic food security is national security, and it must be protected.

It is one of the principal duties of any Government to ensure that their people have access to sufficient safe, affordable and nutritious food. As Baroness Manningham-Buller, the former director general of MI5, has said, food security is national security. If we cannot feed ourselves, we are vulnerable—economically, strategically and in the choices available to us as a country.

I sought this debate because of what is happening in my constituency, which I believe is a small version of what is happening right across the country. We face proposals for major development on open green spaces and on our farms—land that local people quite reasonably understand to be green belt, farmland and open countryside. These are not blank spaces on a map; they are working fields, grazing land and green buffers between communities. They prevent urban sprawl and prevent areas such as mine from simply being swallowed up into a suburb of a greater Birmingham. I want to look at three things: the effect on domestic food production; the environmental consequences, especially flooding; and the Government’s policy direction, which is pushing us down the wrong path, through the treatment of the green belt, the invention of so-called grey belt, and tax proposals that will make it harder for family farms to survive.

In recent years, households across Britain have seen food prices spiral. We see it every time we go into the supermarket; we seem to put less in the trolley but pay more at the checkout. Of course, that is driven by global shocks, the war in Ukraine and supply chain pressures. At its peak, food inflation reached 20%, and people saw it in the basic cost of goods. Global instability, import prices, exchange rates, skyrocketing input costs and continued pressure from the war in Ukraine meant that between January 2021 and April 2025, UK food prices increased by 36%, over three times more than in the previous decade.

At the same time, the UK’s capacity to produce its own food has steadily declined. We now produce roughly 60% of the food we consume by calories; in the 1980s, we were close to 78%. That is a huge shift in one working lifetime, and it is a worrying downward trend. The picture by sector is even starker. We grow just over half the vegetables that we eat and only around 15% of the tomatoes that we consume, and fresh fruit production stands at just around 16%. Those numbers should start to ring alarm bells if they are not doing so already.

While that has been happening, we have lost hundreds of thousands of hectares of farmland to development and long-term environmental land use change. These are not temporary changes. Once productive farmland is built on or turned over to schemes that cannot be reversed, it rarely comes back; when it’s gone, it’s gone. We all accept that homes are needed, but it should worry us that so many have been placed on productive land when large brownfield areas remain underused. There is enough previously developed land in England to take well over 1 million homes, yet the easier, cheaper option of edge-of-town, green-belt development continues to be both developers’ and the Government’s preference. This is where food security starts being undermined not by global events, but by our own planning choices.

Against that backdrop, the last thing we should be doing is making it harder for farming families to stay on their land, yet that is exactly what this Government’s changes to agricultural inheritance—now widely referred to as the family farm tax—would do. Most farms in this country are family businesses. They are part of the local economy, of the landscape and of the food supply chain. The Government’s proposals would pull most of them into new inheritance tax rules. That is not a small technical tweak; it creates a financial hit at the very moment a family is trying to pass the farm on. If a family has to sell land, or even the whole farm, simply to cover a tax bill under the new rules, there is no safeguard that the land will remain agricultural. More often than not, it is snapped up by developers, meaning that previously productive farms become speculative housing sites.

I congratulate the right hon. Lady on securing the debate. The issue about the number of farms above the £1.5 million mark is that 30% of British farms made no money last year. West Dorset farmers are responsible for maintaining 70% of the land. That number will only decrease as they are forced to carve up their assets to pay these bills.

That is exactly the point. Many farming families—often the hill farmers, in particular, but the arable farmers too—struggle. The last couple of years have been really difficult for many farmers. If they have one bad year, it is very hard for them to recover the next year. They are working against so many factors over which they have no control, weather being one of them. It is really important that, in all our deliberations, we recognise that.

The right hon. Lady makes a really important point. The value of a farm depends on where it is are based, but farmers do not see that money, because they are—I know this phrase is often used—asset rich and cash poor, so families are put in the awful situation of potentially having to sell off parts of their family farm to pay these taxes. However, they need economies of scale to make farming work, so quite often they are looking after their farm and also renting areas from other farms to make sure that the books balance.

The hon. Lady makes a really important point, setting out yet again the challenges that farmers face. I am a farmer’s daughter; my dad was a farm worker for many years. We lived on a farm; we grew up in a tied cottage. That sort of farm is often very different from the massive farms in parts of the country where there is more arable land rather than land for hill farmers. Every farm is unique—every farm is different—but many of the challenges that farms face are very similar.

All of this comes at a time when family farm businesses are under unprecedented pressure. We have talked about the costs, but input costs have risen by more than 40% since 2015. Fertiliser is up by nearly 40%, feed by over a quarter and energy by more than a third. National Farmers’ Union surveys show confidence among farmers at its lowest recorded level. Two thirds expect profits to fall, and nearly half plan to reduce investment.

I congratulate my right hon. Friend on securing the debate. Does she agree that that depleted confidence comes against the backdrop of all the pressures that she has discussed, including the pressures from the Government to increase house building, and the opportunity that farmers see to replace arable or pastoral farming with a new cash crop in the form of solar, and that ultimately, depletion of morale is probably the worst affliction on the farming community, because, regardless of other considerations, there is a risk that there comes a point when most farmers say, “We just can’t do this any more”?

My hon. Friend makes a really important point. Sadly, suicide is very high among the farming community, which is another indicator of the many pressures that our farms are facing. I return to the point that I do not think that we appreciate our farms, farmers or farming communities enough in this place. That is the backdrop that some of us are fighting against. To introduce a new tax burden at this moment risks accelerating the loss of domestic production. If we are serious about food security, it is exactly the wrong time to treat a farm as if it were simply an asset to be broken up.

I will return to what is happening locally. At Stonnall Road in Aldridge, there is an outline planning application for around 355 houses on a site that we have always understood to be green belt—a vital green buffer for the village. Hundreds of residents have already backed my petition against the development. They are not opposed to housing, but they struggle to see why that productive land—well-used green space—has suddenly become the soft target, when brownfield sites exist in Walsall and, indeed, Birmingham city centre. Surely that is where we should be doing much more regeneration work.

The right hon. Lady is making an important speech, some of which I agree with and some of which I do not. She will understand, as we all do, that the current planning system does not resolve these issues very effectively. She will also know that the previous Government had plans to develop a land use framework, and that was announced three or four years ago. Why does she think that the previous Government did not bring that framework forward?

As the hon. Gentleman said, there are some things that we agree on and others that we do not. However, I have long campaigned against building on the green belt—on our green fields. Even during our time in government, there were certain aspects of planning that I spoke out about—those who were here at the time of the last Government will probably remember that—and, believe me, I will continue to do so, because I feel so passionately about it.

Over on Chester Road in Streetly, another eight or nine hectares in my constituency—again, green belt and on the edge of the built-up area—are now being described as grey belt and suggested for the local plan. It raises the same concerns: what happens to our fields? What happens to local food production? What happens to roads, GP access and school places? What does it mean when this pattern is repeated across the country? Chipping away at the edges of green space means altering the balance between built land and productive land, and once that balance tips, it is very difficult to recover.

The green belt is not perfect, but it has achieved two essential things: it constrains sprawl around major urban areas, and it provides a degree of protection for farmland and green spaces. To many communities, the introduction of grey belt feels like an attempt to weaken those protections by stealth, because once land is marked as “grey” rather than “green”, the presumption shifts, and with it, the likelihood of development.

In relation to the intervention from the hon. Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner), the fundamental problem is that although successive Governments have said, “We favour brownfield,” there is not sufficient push behind it. In my constituency, we are legally driven to accept every application on its own merits. Applications are made almost exclusively for greenfield sites, rather than brownfield ones. We have to approve them, because we have no legal means by which to turn them down. That is the essential problem, and I do not think that it has been addressed in the new legislation. There is not enough push for local authorities to promote brownfield sites over greenfield ones.

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. We talk about a brownfield-first approach, and it can work. We saw examples of it in the west midlands under the leadership of the former mayor, Andy Street. Developments such as those on the Caparo and Harvestime sites show that it can be done, but it needs funding to help level the playing field, so that brownfield is as attractive to developers as greenfield sites. It can be done, but it requires the Government to put money into brownfield remediation and to properly focus it.

Local authorities feel huge pressure at the moment, but brownfield sites, some of them derelict for decades, remain untouched. It is crazy. No one is arguing that the green belt can never change, but there must be a high bar, genuine scrutiny and clear honesty about what is being sacrificed. Above all, we should start with a genuine, not rhetorical, commitment to brownfield first. Farmers also tell me that they face conflicting pressures from all sides. Tree-planting targets, rewetting proposals, biodiversity applications—none of those aims is wrong, but when piled on top of housing allocations and complicated tax changes, they steadily squeeze the land available for food production.

The right hon. Lady has talked a lot about housing and development infringement upon the green belt. An issue in my area, around the village of Scotton, is the proposal for a huge solar farm. While I completely agree and want to see that the targets and net zero are reached, does the right hon. Lady agree that rather than using prime agricultural land, we should be looking at the roofs of distribution warehousing and other alternatives first?

I do. The hon. Gentleman talks a lot of sense. There are so many areas where we should be putting solar panels. I despair when I drive down the M40 around the west midlands and see field after field full of solar panels. I can understand why a farmer may want to go down the diversification route—because it helps to balance the books—but there are surely better sites such as rooftops and garage tops. Why are we not being a little more creative in what we are doing?

I will happily answer the question, drawing on my experience in solar: it is because the amount of money for the export does not make rooftop solar viable on a commercial scale. To provide the simplest numbers: it costs 50p per unit to put it on ground mount, about £1 per unit to put it on rooftop and £1.50 to put it on carports. Unless we increase the export value to 12p to 15p per unit, it will never stack up. That is why.

I appreciate a bit of knowledge in Westminster Hall, but the point remains that we still need to be more creative in where we put our solar panels. Maybe they could be put on larger rooftop spaces, and we often talk about brownfield and urban sites; to go straight for productive green fields is just total madness. There are real concerns about proposals that would give Natural England sweeping compulsory purchase powers that could see productive farmland acquired for environmental offsetting. If that goes ahead, the loss of farmland could become permanent and unchallengeable. I hope that the Minister will look very carefully at those proposals.

Flooding is another consequence that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs cannot and must not ignore. Fields at Stonnall Road in my constituency and elsewhere do not only grow crops or support livestock; they also absorb water. They drain slowly and hold back surface run-off. If we replace them with bricks, concrete, tarmac and driveways there will be nowhere for the water to go. We saw this recently with the heavy rain this weekend causing flooding more quickly because the natural buffers have been reduced. Every time it happens, local people ask the same question: why were those fields built on?

Natural flood management relies on soil, hedgerows, woodlands and wetlands, yet that is rarely at the forefront of planning decisions. If we are serious about preventing flooding, we must consider the cumulative impact of losing those natural soakaways. How is DEFRA working with the Environment Agency and local planning authorities to ensure that the flood risk from losing open land is properly accounted for before permissions are given?

I do not wish to challenge your timings, Dr Murrison, so I will start to draw this all together. First, food production must be treated as a strategic priority. Departments should not be signing off major land use decisions without asking the basic question: what does this mean for our ability to grow food and feed our nation? The NFU is absolutely right to call for food security impact assessments on all relevant policies. We have impact tests for almost everything else, and it is extraordinary that food security is not one of them.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Murrison. I thank the right hon. Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Wendy Morton) for securing this debate.

My constituency consists of many acres of high-quality farmland. I am proud to be a Labour MP representing such a vibrant rural community with farming at its core. I hope the Minister is aware of some of the specific challenges in my county. It is no surprise that it easy to get solar panels into the ground in Norfolk, which is very flat and sandy; we are likely to be near good grid connections as well. We are seeing more than our fair share of solar farm applications. Solar farms are eyeing up our prime farmland. For example, the High Grove application in my constituency, if approved, would see a third of that site on best and most versatile land and 20% on grade 2 and above. At 4,000 acres, it would be one of the largest solar farms in the UK. Anyone can do the maths about the amount of grade 2 agricultural land that would be lost.