Agriculture

My Lords, I join in congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Vinson, on staging this debate, and I welcome especially the return of the Minister, my former neighbour in Birmingham when we were both at the other end of the building, to ploughing this particular furrow. I know that he has a strong attachment to it. I should tell your Lordships that I was briefly a Member of the Commons Agricultural Select Committee, and for 10 years during the last century I was on the staff of Farmers Weekly; not sitting at the seat of the noble Lord, Lord Plumb, but more often than not enjoying a glass with him and none the less picking up his wise views on the state of the industry then. Of course then, as now, the health of British agriculture was vital to all those industries that make fertilisers, sprays, medicines, machinery, twines, vehicles and all the rest. Then, as more painfully now, the costs of oil-based inputs were crucial to the industry’s prosperity. As in too many of our basic industries, the ““big is better”” philosophy overtook the more sustainable ““small is beautiful”” experience. I believe that we have neglected the importance to agriculture and rural communities of small, family-run farms, either tenanted or owned, and sadly the healthy independence of farmers has perhaps denied them the benefits of co-operative buying, selling and other innovation. I want to talk briefly about Mr Bill Howes, who runs a 30-strong herd of Tamworth pigs at the back of his semi in Burton Green near Coventry. The Tamworth pig, of course, is primarily a bacon pig. The ““Rural Living”” section of the Birmingham Post yesterday helpfully told us how last year Mr Howes won with his Tamworths at the Royal Show, just at the end of his road in Stoneleigh near Kenilworth, and at the Three Counties Show near Malvern, and that he took Reserve Champion in the interbreeds class at the Hatfield Show in Hertfordshire. Does he like his pigs? This is part of a poem he wrote about them:"““If you like pork and bacon too,""A Tamworth is the pig for you""By young and old, its meat is eaten,""For its flavour, it can’t be beaten,""For something special in your sty,""A Tamworth is the pig to buy””." Now there’s a man who knows and cares about his pigs. It illustrates the point that small can indeed be successful and beautiful. The tragedy now is that too many people—and not all of them young, as my noble friend pointed out—think that milk comes out of a bottle and meat from a shrink-wrapped pack. The industry itself has perhaps been too inward looking, and it has taken harder times for farmers to get into innovative ways of earning a living where that is possible, and especially the development in terms of both cash and consciousness of taking farmers’ markets into the hearts of our towns and cities. They have been a great success and they speak volumes about the regard with which the agricultural industry is generally still held. But farming, like every other supply or service industry, depends on people, and most people need somewhere affordable to live. Almost one in five of England’s population lives in rural areas, a point not always appreciated. They live in settlements with populations of fewer than 10,000 people. Workplace earnings data show that average earnings in 2004-05 in most rural districts were £17,400 a year compared with £22,300 in the major urban districts. Those figures come from a timely final report published yesterday by the Affordable Rural Housing Commission. It was set up last July by Defra and the then ODPM. Its task was to inquire into the scale, nature and implications of the shortage of affordable housing for rural communities in England and to make recommendations to help address this unmet need. In passing, I am very sorry that the brief kindly provided by the NFU for the debate today did not even mention rural housing. I know that the union recognises the problem, and I am only sorry that the issue was forgotten. I commend the formidable Eleanor Goodman, a distinguished former political editor at Channel 4, for producing such a thorough report in a mere 10 months. It is interesting to note that the problem of the lack of affordable housing either to rent or to buy in many of our towns and cities is precisely mirrored in rural areas. One of the major causes in both cases is that councils were not allowed to build to replace when a previous Conservative Government introduced the right to buy. That, as the commission report argues, has had a proportionately greater impact on reducing the stock of social housing in rural areas than it has in towns, and fewer homes have been built to replace it. And affordability has fallen over the years. Between 2000 and 2005 the average house price rose by £73 in every £100 in rural areas, against £68 in every £100 in urban areas. The commission makes what I believe is a compelling case for building more affordable housing for rent, part sale or sale, arguing that 11,000 new homes a year are needed in settlements of less than 10,000; that number could be reviewed over time. The Housing Corporation plans to fund housing associations to build around 3,000 homes in these areas in each of the next two years, but that ignores the fact, as I have said, that roughly one in five of the population lives in rural areas but gets only one in 10 of the new homes that the Housing Corporation is going to fund. It is not as if suitable land in rural areas is not available. The report notes that a good deal of land in the countryside is owned by the public sector. Some of it has become redundant. One thinks of the sites of former big out-of-town mental hospitals and military establishments, let alone former industrial brownfield land. The commission urges extending the partnership, working between public bodies and the private sector to release this land. The answer, says the Commission, is to expand the ways that link private and other non-statutory bodies and the public sector in affordable housing. The idea is to involve landowners, the private sector and the not-for-profit organisations, such as community land trusts, to work together to enable those who work in rural areas to be able to afford to live there, with a prospect of their children being not too far away when they start to raise their own families. The report’s most controversial suggestion is that local councils should have planning powers to prevent the sale of properties in rural areas as second homes, exempting present second homes. An ODPM survey two years ago found that there were 93,000 second homes in mainly rural districts of England. The use of such powers will be decided on a case-by-case basis and would build upon the restrictions already in place in most of the national parks and to be introduced in parts of the Scottish highlands. I should say to the noble Baroness opposite that this makes it the more surprising that the Conservative spokesman on communities and local government in the other place condemned the suggestion yesterday. Barely was the ink dry upon the report. I hope that she will reflect more deeply on that. That is why I am glad that the Secretary of State for Rural Affairs, David Miliband, and Ruth Kelly, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, are giving this idea careful consideration. This is not a small matter. In South Hams in Devon, 10.9 per cent of the homes in that district are second homes. In North Norfolk, the figure is 10 per cent; in Penwith in Cornwall it is 8.6 per cent and in South Lakeland in Cumbria it is 7.6 per cent. So this is a really big issue. If we are serious about meeting the need for affordable housing in rural areas, it will need more than words and rhetoric to build them.