My Lords, I begin by saying how pleased I am to be following my noble friend Lord Marlesford who, while his experience of farming is at the opposite end of England to mine, shares many of my concerns, interests and priorities. I also declare my own interests as a farmer and landowner in Cumbria.
I approach these amendments from the perspective that the scope of the financial powers in the Bill should, so long as they are discretionary, be drawn as widely as possible. I understand the strictures of the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, but at this stage, when we really do not know how the future is going to evolve, we must keep our options open.
I spent some of the summer looking at farm accounts, and one of the things that struck me is that most of the money that comes into farming in rural Britain comes from the food sector. If this is to change rapidly and significantly, some huge bills are going to have to be picked up by somebody somewhere and, certainly, in the middle of the current financial predicament in which the nation finds itself, we have not got unlimited resources to do that even if we wanted to. In the short term, I cannot see that this form of income into the agricultural sector can be found either by cutting costs or by another form of payments if there is a dramatic reduction in income from food production. Therefore, it seems to me that this has got to be at the core of rural land use businesses, and policies for them, in the immediate future.
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What we are all talking about in the discussion on this Bill—and everybody is doing this but from slightly different perspectives—is trying to find ways of balancing the various conflicting uses, and the implications of those uses, for rural Britain. While food quality and food security may not, in an economist’s strict sense, be public goods, I believe that, using those words in a lay man’s sense, they must be at the heart of rural policy. Hence, they are within the scope of the financial provisions of the Bill, which, as I said, are discretionary and not mandatory.
For example, if we talk about carbon contributions made by emissions from grazing and other livestock, it is very appropriate to think about how we can find ways in which those emissions might be reduced by changing the way those animals are looked after. Of course, this may well mean that the cost to the consumer of the products will have to go up. While we say this, we must not overlook the fact that, although food prices may be at a historically low level, for many people this still represents a very substantial part of their family’s expenditure.
Finally, I will throw my weight behind Amendment 48, of the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, in respect of common land. I declare that I am president of the Uplands Alliance. It seems to me that common land has been elbowed out of agricultural politics for far too long. In my view, farming common land is as much a mainstream form of farming as growing wheat in Lincolnshire, and it should be recognised as such by policymakers and politicians.
As I said in my opening remarks, I believe that the powers of financial assistance in this Bill should be drawn as widely as is reasonably possible, but they must be discretionary and not mandatory because we are all of us feeling our way towards a different rural future—one that I would like to think is better than the one we have now. However, we do not know in detail how this will evolve.