I beg to move,
That this House has considered the matter of farming on Dartmoor.
I am delighted to serve both under your chairmanship, Mr Hosie, and in the company of so many of my hon. and right hon. Friends. It is good to see representatives from other parties present to discuss this question as well.
I should say at once that the issues connected with Dartmoor are enormously complex, and they have been debated over decades, if not longer. I do not intend to enter into the wider debate as to what is right or wrong in connection with overgrazing or undergrazing, or as to the causes of the problems that we face on Dartmoor today. The immediate occasion of the debate—I am grateful to the Minister for preliminary discussions—is a problem that has arisen in connection with the farmers on Dartmoor, the viability of their business, and the levels of stocking and grazing that are to be expected by Natural England in connection with the renewal of their higher level stewardship arrangements.
Farmers on Dartmoor sustain the communities of Dartmoor. They breed a particularly independent and hardy-minded type of family who are able to make a living from the harsh and adverse environment that the moorland presents. There are approximately 900 farms and 23 commons on Dartmoor. Dartmoor is owned by a patchwork of private landowners, including the Duchy of Cornwall—there are many other landowners—but it is divided into 23 commons. Some of the land is tenanted, but invariably the commoners have rights to graze on those commons, and there are hundreds of commoners. It is therefore a particularly complex environment.
The higher level stewardship schemes were introduced on Dartmoor in the early 2000s. They were 10-year agreements. Broadly speaking, they commenced in 2012 and 2013, and they are now due for renewal. It is open to farmers to extend their agreements by five years, and the first agreements started to expire in February of this year. The problem that has arisen is this: in or about February of this year, a letter arrived at all of the commoners’ associations, each of which is responsible for the management of one of the 23 commons, indicating to them that, if they were to enter into new agreements, they would have to remove their stock entirely from the moors in the wintertime. What in fact was said was that, other than ponies—you may be familiar with the famous Dartmoor pony, Mr Hosie—stocking and grazing in the winter would be permitted only if they could be justified on ecological and environmental grounds. In essence, that has been interpreted to mean—and Natural England does not appear to contest that it means—the effective removal of stocking and grazing in the winter.
The letter was followed a few weeks later by another letter to a particular common indicating that it would have to reduce its summer grazing by some 80%. Were those indications to be implemented, they would effectively mean the complete eradication of grazing on that common throughout the year and only 20% levels in the summer.
That exploded a metaphorical bomb in the small and fragile communities that the moorland hosts. Throughout the entire moor, Natural England’s policy was interpreted to be to apply those stocking levels across the moor. I am glad to say that that is now apparently not Natural England’s intention, but the fact is that those letters were written without consultation or warning. Not a single organisation on the moor was consulted—not the Dartmoor National Park Authority, not the Dartmoor Commoners’ Council, not the landowners, not the farmers’ groups. Not a single warning was given before that sudden and unexpected announcement by the statutory regulator for the moor, which controls the sites of special scientific interest where statutory consent must be given and, more widely, advises the Rural Payments Agency on whether it should agree to these higher level agreements. Not a single word of consultation was given or received.
I think my right hon. and hon. Friends would agree that that was an extremely unfortunate step for the regulator to have taken, and I think it regrets it. I have had a chance to speak to representatives of the agency, and there is no doubt that it accepts that its communications were poor. The problem on Dartmoor is that there has been a steady and gradual breakdown in the relationship of trust and confidence that should exist between the statutory regulator and the farming communities that, by common consent, must implement the agency’s statutory objectives. Natural England cannot fulfil its statutory objectives without the people, the human capital of Dartmoor. Therefore, if that relationship of trust is damaged, the problem of how we manage this precious landscape for the future, both for Dartmoor’s inhabitants—its families and wider communities—and in the wider public interest, will get far worse.