I came here today to speak up for upland farmers in my constituency. Although I am not a farmer myself, I grew up within smelling distance of a dairy farm, and coming from a working background, I have earned a living working outdoors in all weathers as a gardener, so I know what it feels like to have mud on my boots and frozen fingers. For a lot of our farmers, though, the physical strain is only part of the daily struggle; the other part is the anxiety of having so much invested in such a precarious business, and the burden of responsibility for keeping the farm alive in an era of shrinking profits.
Because farmers are working people who deserve secure livelihoods, and because food security is essential for our national security, I hold quarterly forums with the farmers in my area—I say that before anyone tries to intervene to ask me how many I meet with. I hold regular forums and, in fact, some of our council candidates are local sheep and cattle farmers. Of course, I have met with them more in the last few weeks than I had been doing. In the meantime, I am having conversations with fellow MPs and with DEFRA and Treasury officials and Ministers to push for the issues that matter to farmers in our area.
As such, when I went to the Bill Office last night to receive the motion for today’s debate, I was genuinely unsure how I would vote. I read it with an open mind, but when I saw it, I thought, “What a load of tripe.” By the way, I thank the right hon. Member for Salisbury (John Glen) for taking a much more constructive tone in his speech a moment ago. The Opposition could have come to the Chamber today and presented a constructive motion that many rural MPs on the Government Back Benches would have sympathised with. Instead, this motion seems calibrated to make us want to oppose it. It seems to me that the Opposition are more interested in playing party politics and cosplaying as the friends of farmers with this motion than they are in genuinely addressing issues that they both ignored in government and are now ignoring in opposition.
Some legitimate concerns about the policy have been expressed to me by farmers in my constituency. By the way, many farmers in my constituency sympathise with its aims and with what the Government are trying to achieve. One told me recently that he cannot stand the James Dysons of this world who are hoovering up agricultural land. However, they are concerned that
there remains a tax incentive to invest in agricultural land, and I would be grateful if the Treasury reported on some of that modelling. For example, we know that 7% of wealthy claimants account for 40% of the cost of APR, but that means that 93% are costing only £382 million. It would be interesting to know how much money it would cost to slightly lift the thresholds or to address the concerns about life insurance.