I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Waveney (Peter Aldous) for securing this debate and I congratulate the Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, my right hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood (Mark Spencer), on his appointment. It is one of those rare beast occasions when we have a round peg in a round hole. I am sure that he will be a Minister for agriculture.
In Thanet, we have Thanet Earth, which is probably the prime example of sustainable crop production in the United Kingdom. It is the largest greenhouse complex in Europe—at present, it is the size of about seven football pitches—and grows a variety of tomatoes under glass. It is highly successful and I think that it is blazing a trail, but—this is the “but”—most of the agriculture in the “Garden of England” and most of the agriculture in Thanet is still out in the open fields, or what is left of the open fields. That is my problem and the point that I will discuss.
We have two issues. One is the spread of solar farms on agricultural land, which is unsustainable and in my view unforgivable. There are acres of rooftop, acres of carparks and acres of public space on which solar farms can and should be put. They should not be put on agricultural land and I hope that practice will stop forthwith under the new Administration.
The second issue is agricultural policy. Our desire to be sustainable in food production is simply not compatible with our housing policy. I raised with the previous Prime Minister at Prime Minister’s Question Time some months ago the need for a moratorium on house building on agricultural land. In Thanet, we have grade one and grade two alluvial soil. It is some of the finest land in the country, but we are smothering it with houses.
The issue of water supply has also been raised today. The more we smother our agricultural land with housing, the more our aquifers, such as the Thanet aquifer, will dry up. Actually, that might not matter very much, because if we do not have any land to grow crops on, crops will not need watering.
All I want to say, and this really is all I want to say to my right hon. Friend the Minister today, is this: please can we get back to the days when the Ministry for Agriculture, as it then was, had a veto over change of use on agricultural land, and can we have a moratorium on building on agricultural land, so that we can grow the food that this country needs?
2.33 pm