Agriculture Bill — House of Lords, 2020-07-21
Topic: Agriculture
John Lawrence Whitty (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, apropos of the discussion on the previous group of amendments, this is the first time I have contacted your Lordships from rural Dorset. The bandwidth and the stability of the internet connection appear to be somewhat suspect, so if I get cut off, your Lordships will understand This amendment is about introducing a new generation of farmers to our agricultural system. Much of the debate on the Bill has been about the outputs of farming: food, and the impact on the environment and the countryside. The key inputs into farming are of course the skill and enterprise of those who work the land, but we have heard very little about that in the debate. A subsequent amendment from my noble friend Lady Jones of Whitchurch deals with the general improvement of the supply, quality and skill of labour in agriculture, which I will strongly support. However, this amendment is about getting people in who will run their own farms and who need to be given that opportunity I well remember when I was first made an Agriculture Minister—over 20 years ago now—and I was told that the average age of English farmers was about 59; I was slightly younger at that point, but not a lot. I was slightly shocked at that, but then I was told that this was always the case, because you either inherited your land from your father or your uncle or you had to save up enough money to buy the land. Another way in was provided from the beginning of the last century by many rural counties, which established tenancies directly for young farmers who could not afford to enter in the normal way through inheritance or purchase. It was a successful scheme, and it continued and was reinforced after the Second World War. However, from the 1980s, there was a drastic fall in the number of tenancies and the acreage covered by such tenancies almost halved. We sped it up a bit around 2000 but in the last 10 years, as a recent report by the CPRE shows, there has been a further 10% decline in the areas covered by county tenancies This is a crucial way in, yet some of our proud rural counties have drastically reduced the acreage covered by county tenancies. These include counties such as Herefordshire, Somerset, North Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, and some counties, such as Northumberland, Northamptonshire and Lancashire, appear from the figures not to have any county tenancies nowadays. Even my own adopted county of Dorset—whose internet connection is not great—has also capped its tenancy by 10% over the last 10 years. This is pretty disastrous in terms of getting new blood into managing farms and running their own farms My amendment is quite modest, but it would require those counties with such smallholdings to review the situation and not to dispose of any such holdings except for the purposes similar to the objectives of the county farm tenancies. That would require each county to work out a new strategy, discuss it with Defra, continue to provide support for those tenancies that existed and, hopefully, resume providing further tenancies I was heartened at the end of the previous day of the Committee stage when the noble Baroness, Lady Bloomfield, indicated that there will be some support for county farms as a result of the new agricultural system. I have yet to see any details of that, but it would be important to improve availability for rural young farmers, or indeed urban people who wish to get into farming, if the county scheme could be revived or, at the very least, stopped from declining further. An objective assessment by the counties and Defra would reinstate tenancies and start increasing the amounts of such tenancies that are available, which should help to herald a new future in farming for those who desperately want to run their own farm and improve the environment at the same time. I beg to move.