From the Yorkshire Post:
The Tory Shadow Environment Secretary Nick Herbert told National Farmers' Union conference yesterday that he and his party wanted to bring in "practical, deliverable policies" and vowed to take on the European Union to ensure that any new legislation will not damage UK interests. In an eye-catching move, Mr Herbert told delegates that he would commission an industry-led review of the bureaucracy and red tape which effects farmers within three months of being elected. (1)
He also promised to prevent any development upon grade 1 and 2 agricultural land except in exceptional circumstances. The regulation would cover more than a fifth of English farmland. (2)
And Mr Herbert said he would enforce a shake-up of the Rural Payments Agency in which the farming Minister would be made its chairman, taking direct responsibility for management of the system (3).
Mr Herbert said: "Labour has persistently under-valued British agriculture, failing to understand that we all depend on the production of food (4), while the countryside relies on farmers' stewardship of the environment (5). Despite its importance to our food security (6), the protection of our best farmland has been downgraded and the Government has over-ridden councils who have sought to keep in place local protection of this valuable asset.(7)"
1) All that red tape is EU driven, and there is little you can do about that apart from leaving. You're either in or out. You can't make compromises or do deals with them.
2) FFS, only about ten or twelve per cent of the UK by surface area is built on (or gardens etc) and the rest is nearly all farmland. The existing Hallowed Greenbelt already covers eleven per cent of England (Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are even more sparsely populated than England), i.e. as much again as the developed bit. So apart from grabbing the NIMBY vote, what on earth difference is this supposed to make? Why not go the whole hog and declare the remaining eighty-eight per cent of the UK that is not already built on to be Hallowed Greenbelt? Why not just be honest and say that under a Tory government, there will be a blanket ban on the construction of anything whatsoever?
3) At present, these are subsidies to land ownership (and so ought to be scrapped). The rules will change in future, but they are still subsidies - so either farmers are subsidy junkies or that tip-top prime farmland which he wants to 'protect' ain't so tip-top prime after all, eh? Which is it, Nick, you shit?
4) Complete bollocks, of course, or at best misleading. Less than one per cent of the UK adult population actually work on farms, and of course there are more working in processing plants, wholesale and retail, of course, but agriculture is hardly a mainstay of our economy. A more sensible analysis of the position is "we all depend on the production of food somewhere in the world, whether in the UK or abroad, so if we allow small amounts of land close to urban centres to be used for more profitable activities, food from abroad will become, in relative terms, cheaper. Relaxing planning laws would, ultimately, improve our food security".
5) Oh, f*** off. We could just leave parts of the countryside to grow wild - which is what farmers do. They don't bother with the very steep bits or rocky bits or the marshy bits. Has he never looked out of a train window or something? The little copses and forests are all on the steeper bits or the marshy bits that you can't work with a tractor. Leaving farmers to apply commonsense requires no effort or subsidies whatsoever, does it?
6) See (4)
7) What value? To whom? Try giving every young couple a few hundred square yards on the edge of an urban area and leave it up to them. If they choose to live in a caravan in one corner and grow food on the rest, then good luck to them. If they're lucky, they might just about earn the minimum wage from the food they can sell. Alternatively, they might prefer to have a house built. If they choose the latter (and I'm sure most would), it is quite clear that that plot's value as residential land is far higher than its value as an allotment.
Shit.
A grim document
3 hours ago
7 comments:
As a farmer I have a vested interest here, so I'll restrict myself to pointing out that subsidies are not coupled to land anymore, and are claimed by whoever is the 'entitlement holder' who may be a landowner, or may be a tenant. Basically it is the person running the business who gets the subsidy not the land owner. (Though of course the presence of subsidies means rents to landlords are higher than they would otherwise be).
S, agreed, it's all very tricky. But paying a subsidy to former landowners is even more insane.
1. The red tape may originate in Brussels, but it grows considerably in its passage through Whitehall, AFAIK.
2. A little over-reaction here perhaps? The twenty odd percent of British farmland that is grade 1 or 2 is the best land. Surely it makes some sense to restrict other uses of this land, while relaxing controls on the rest. It doesn't really make sense to build an airport (Heathrow) on some of the most fertile land in the country.
3. IMHO, farming subsidies are there so that supermarkets can pay a less-than-viable price for food supplies.
B,
1. Agreed, our government makes it worse, that's no reason not to leave the EU.
2. Nope. If they were to declare a quarter of the 85% of UK land that is farmland to be sacrosanct and abandon planning restrictions on the rest, then brilliant, but that is not what they said, is it?
As to Heathrow*, what is a better use of a few square miles of land - a billion pounds from an airport or a million pounds from farming? You tell me.
* I don't like flying in the slightest, but other people clearly do.
3. Perhaps some of the subsidies accrue to supermarkets, so what? That is even more reason to scrap them.
Point one is the giveaway in this argument. The civil service went native in Brussels in a very short space of time. However, they have always failed to realise that they should not apply UK standards to EU law.
The result is that every regulation that is transferred from Brussels if so bound up in perfect language that it ends up having a perverse effect.
Farming has been neglected, and although the EU is responsibe for the system - the UK is responsble for failing to react to the way that the rest of the EU transforms the directives, and thereby creating a very uneven playing field.
This is not an argument for staying in the EU, I'd as soon get out tomorrow, but it is not the remedy for all ills, especially the self inflicted ones.
2. It's more than a fifth, but surely less than a quarter, or they would have said "a quarter" and no, he didn't say anything about planning controls on the remaining 80%, one way or the other, so we don't know what his intentions are. The point I am making about Heathrow is that you could have had your billion and your million pounds, if you'd sited your airport on land that is agriculturally worthless, like Essex salt-marshes.
3. I'm against subsidies, too. AFAICS it's the supermarkets who benefit from them, not the farmers. You only have to look at the cost of a pint of milk to them and what they sell it for.
5. This looks like a content-free statement to me, unless it's a dig at NuLab's statism (the alternative to farmers "stewarding" the countryside is the state doing it), in which case, OK.
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