My Lords, the Minister in the Commons told the House of Commons that he knew for five years that the money was going to run out, but he said nothing.

Instead, he waited until the money ran out and slammed the door— overnight—on more than half of English agricultural holdings, in breach of the six-week notice period that was cynically, overnight, airbrushed off the Defra website.

His only reason for this was that there might otherwise have been a rush of applications. His only advice to farmers was to apply immediately for any new SFI that is opened, which is surely itself a recipe for a precipitous rush.

It also ignores that inquiries to Defra by farmers seeking to get their applications right take months to get a reply. It took me three years to get answers, and those were still incomplete when the scheme was shut in the face of my family farm.

Finally, the Minister then tells hard-pressed rural communities that his department running out of money should be “a cause for celebration”. I cannot help but recall the rustic expression, “Don’t piddle down my back and tell me that it’s raining”.

Can the Minister tell the House what lessons have been learned from this latest disaster for so many family farms?

As I mentioned earlier, this is not the first time that SFI has been paused. The way the scheme operates is that it opens for applications and, when the funding is used up, it is then paused until we look at the next round of SFI funding.

It is difficult to judge when that is likely to come to an end. In response to the noble Lord’s final question, we are aware that the SFI scheme needs reforming, which is what we are now looking at doing. We need to get it right and we need it to work better for farmers and for the environment.

That is why, as I mentioned, we will be talking to stakeholders, including those who use the scheme and those who we would like to use it but who perhaps find it difficult to apply to at the moment.

I am particularly talking about smaller farms and upland farms; we need to be much more targeted on them. We are aware that we need to reform it, and we are working on that at the moment.

My Lords, I refer the House to my register of interests. It is somewhat disingenuous of the Minister to say that the SFI scheme has been paused twice. The previous two occasions were actually pilot schemes, which were then rolled forward, so I do not accept that.

Following on from the question from the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, what assessment has been made of whether Defra has sufficient resources and staff to deliver commitments across the environment and food security, and what is the Minister’s assessment of the Rural Payments Agency’s ability to handle the change?

As I said, we need to reform the system and we are working on that; we want it to work as effectively as it possibly can, both to support farmers and to deliver the environmental targets that we need. I have visited the RPA offices in Carlisle, and the staff there work incredibly hard.

We are looking at how we can improve the digital support they get, for example, because we need to ensure that the RPA is fit for the future and able to support farmers as best as it can in the way that it needs to.

My Lords, I thank my noble friend the Minister for her Statement today. On the sustainable farming incentive, I know that she visits Northern Ireland and the other devolved nations fairly regularly, examining agricultural and environmental issues.

When she next visits Northern Ireland, could she discuss with the Minister for Agriculture there the impact of the withdrawal of APR and business property relief? They were essential to sustainable farming in Northern Ireland, where an acre sells for about £25,000.

The level of investment and money needs to be investigated by the Government and the Treasury again.

My Lords, I do not know whether I have an interest to declare. I am not a farmer but the Church Commissioners, who pay my stipend and working costs, are one of the largest landowners of tenanted farms in the UK, so I declare that.

We have had a couple of brief references so far to food security, but might I tempt the Minister to say a little bit more on that subject, particularly given the geopolitical situation we are in at the moment?

In addition, has any assessment been made of the impact that these changes and the announcement last week are likely to have on the UK’s food security?

On food security, as I mentioned earlier, we currently have 37,000 farmers in the SFI scheme, which equates to about 50% of farmland. The purpose of that is to support them to produce food sustainably while also delivering for nature.

The SFI agreements last for three years, so, although we have closed the new applications, the live agreements—the 37,000—remain unaffected and can continue to support sustainable food production.

We are committed to improving food security and are aware that SFI is a major tool that we need to use to support that. We are also looking to boost food security with other tangible measures.

For example, we recently committed to ensure wherever possible that half of food supplied into the public sector is produced locally or certified to high environmental standards.

We have also announced a five-year extension to the seasonal workers visa route and we are looking at reform to the planning system so that farmers can put the necessary infrastructure in place that they need in order to continue to produce food sustainably.

My Lords, further to the question from the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, is the Minister aware that, speaking in the House of Commons before the election, the then shadow Defra Minister, Danny Zeichner, said that farmers in the UK needed complete certainty and stability on the SFI?

He went on to say that an incoming Labour Government would provide exactly that. Is this the Minister’s idea of complete certainty and stability?

My Lords, I declare my farming interests are set out in the register and that I am likely to be affected by the withdrawal of SFI 24. I want to just probe a little further on the two questions that were asked by the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, and the noble Earl, Lord Leicester.

The Government claim that the promised six-week warning of closure was not given due to the potential spike in applications causing budget overspend. Surely, Defra has been monitoring this spending versus budget and advising Ministers accordingly.

Please can the Minister confirm that she is satisfied with the efficacy of the Defra review process and, if so, why the Government did not take early action to avoid this serial blow to farming and the environment?

My Lords, as I said, I am very aware that the sudden closure, when farmers were expecting more notice, has not been easy and that, for many people who were intending to put in applications, as the noble Lord said about himself, that has caused difficulties.

I have friends who are in that boat, so I am very aware that difficulties were caused. I will take the concerns of the House back to the Farming Minister and explain that the unexpected pause and its impacts are felt very strongly by this House.

I am happy to commit to do that, because it is important.

My Lords, I declare my agricultural interests as in the register. My noble friend Lady Batters very much wanted to be here this evening, but as a working farmer she is having to carry out TB testing today.

Following on from some of the earlier questions, can the Minister give a bit more detail of the advice that the new Ministers were given when they came into the department last July, when presumably the officials were already aware that there might be pressures on the fund?

It seems astonishing to everyone in the Chamber that not even the Ministers gave any indication that the funds were running out. Can the Minister give a bit more explanation? The great concern now is that the details of the new scheme may not be announced in the very near future.

Can she indicate when the new revised scheme is likely to be announced?

My Lords—

My Lords—

We will hear from the noble Baroness, Lady Hoey, and then from the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey.

I thank the noble Lord for that. No matter what is said in justification, this will still be seen as an attack on farming, particularly on small farms.

Does the Minister agree that the most important job for farmers is to produce good-quality food, and that all funding going into farming should have that as the priority?

Why are we allowing so many solar farms to be put on good agricultural land, with other land being used for things other than farming? Surely that must be a priority if we genuinely care about food security?

The noble Baroness’s question references a lot of the longer-term work that Defra is doing to get these things right. Regarding solar farms, the land-use framework is designed to look at things such as where we put energy, where the best-quality agricultural land is, where we put housing and so on.

The land-use framework looks to address much of that. Regarding what farmers should be doing, whether their first priority is to produce food and so on, we are developing the food strategy and the 25-year road map for farming.

Both are looking at how we address this and how we ensure that we have high-quality, sustainable food production in this country for us to become as self-sufficient as is practically possible. These are important long-term pieces of work that the department is doing.

We wanted to move away from short-term decision-making that did not deliver in the long run. A big criticism of what has happened with the sustainable farming initiative is that it was too short-term.

Taking that bigger picture view, to give farmers certainty for the future, is a really important piece of work that the department is doing.

The noble Baroness makes a really good point about the increasing intensification of farming, and that is something we do not want to see. Our focus has to be on high-quality sustainable food that we can buy locally, and on farmers being able to support the country.

We said in our manifesto, “food security is national security” and that is very true. It is incumbent on us as the Government to look at how we deliver on that promise.

My Lords, what seems to get missed in this is how little money every farmer in Britain makes out of food. In some instances, especially in dairy, they are making as little as a penny out of what we spend.

Are the Government in their food strategy going to ask the supermarkets to be completely transparent about the amount of profits that they make and the supply chains that they operate?

Will they ask them to start to implement much more local sourcing and a different kind of supply chain so that farmers, whom we are asking so much of, actually get paid for growing food for us?

Fairness within the agricultural supply chain has to be a key priority for the Government, because we know that farmers have suffered under different pricing regimes, if you like, for many years.

If we do not get it right, we will not be able to get the food security that we want as well, because if farmers are going to produce the food that we are asking them to produce, they have to know that they will be paid fairly for that food.

We are going to use powers in the Agriculture Act 2020 to introduce “fair dealing” regulations that will apply to businesses when purchasing agricultural products from farmers.

There have also been new rules for the pig sector introduced to Parliament which ensure that contracts clearly set out expectations and that changes can be made only if agreed by all parties.

This continues on from the work that the previous Government were doing, and I am sure that noble Lords opposite will be very supportive of it.

Following on from that work on pigs, we are committed to bringing in regulations for eggs and fresh produce sectors, as previously proposed by the Government. If we need to intervene with other sectors, then we certainly need to look at that and see what needs to be done.

As I said right at the beginning, we do recognise that this has been an issue for farmers, but we also need to look at how best we can support farmers to create that secure food sector that we so badly need as a country.