It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Nokes. I thank the hon. Member for Stafford (Theo Clarke) for securing this debate.
I begin by saying a huge thank you to farmers in my constituency. They put in tireless hours and are often very underpaid. Farmers are essential workers; they put food on our tables throughout the pandemic—they did not let us down. Yet, they are consistently let down by the UK Government.
The Government should heed the title of this debate and back British farming—not just with rhetoric, but with action. Farming is an essential sector for Scotland: it employs around 67,000 people and supports thousands more in jobs across urban and rural economies, generating a gross output of £3.3 billion annually, directly resulting in a contribution of £1.3 billion to the Scottish economy. However, it has been dealt a hard blow by Brexit.
Just before Christmas, during the chaos preceding the trade and co-operation agreement, a variety of constituents wrote to me; they were blackface sheep farmers and stood to lose thousands of pounds. In Scotland alone, the blackface sheep industry stood to lose £750,000 of sheep if lambs could not be moved to Northern Ireland. That had never posed a problem before Brexit. The then Cabinet Secretary in Scotland, Fergus Ewing, wrote to the DEFRA Secretary of State to raise the issue urgently. It took over three weeks to receive a reply.
Meanwhile, farmers, including some of my constituents, had no idea what they would do in the run-up to Christmas and how much money they stood to lose. That is just one example of how farmers were let down by Brexit, although there are many more. It is hard to see what the advantages of Brexit were for farmers.