Faced with the greatest threat to public health this country has faced in our lifetimes, the government has taken a series of unprecedented steps to protect the NHS and save many thousands of lives. We have all had to adjust our daily lives, and today MPs will vote remotely on legislation for the first time in history as the Agriculture Bill returns to Parliament.
I want to thank a whole army of food heroes who have worked tirelessly to keep the nation fed. Our food supply chain has remained resilient, but the pandemic has only highlighted the essential role of domestic food production in our nation’s food security. I wanted to write to set out how the Agriculture Bill will ensure we have a flourishing agricultural sector while continuing to provide food on our plates.
The Bill will mean that by the end of 2024 we will have replaced the Common Agriculture Policy with a new scheme of Environmental Land Management. We envisage three components to this; firstly, there will be a sustainable farming tier which will be open to farmers across the UK and will incentivise participation in farm level measures such as integrated pest management, hedgerow management and soil health. Secondly, there will be a local environmental tier which could incentivise interventions including the creation of habitats, improving biodiversity, tree planting, and natural flood management. Finally, there will be a landscape scale tier which could support woodland creation, peat land restoration and other potential land use changes.
This is a challenging time for the whole country and we know that our farmers need stability, certainty, and a smooth shift towards our new system of public money for public goods. Next year, we will begin reducing direct payments, but in a progressive way, so that the largest reductions will be applied to the largest payment amounts. This Government stood on a manifesto commitment to guarantee the current annual budget to farmers in every year of the new Parliament, and we have planned a seven-year agricultural transition – giving farmers time to adapt and enabling them to take advantage of the new opportunities that this Bill provides.
I am determined that there will be a prosperous future for British agriculture so we will also introduce new powers to improve fairness and transparency in the supply chain so that farmers get a fair share of the cake and we will introduce grants to help farmers add value to their produce and reduce costs so they can become more prosperous and improve their productivity. There will also be a legal obligation on the Government to produce an assessment of our food security every five years which is now more important than ever.
In the UK, we have built a very special market based on provenance with particular attention to food safety and high animal welfare standards and we have been clear in our manifesto that we will not jeopardise that through trade deals in the future. The Government is committed to striking ambitious new trade deals, but we are clear: in all of our trade negotiations we will not compromise on our high environmental protection, animal welfare and food standards.
This Bill will bring the biggest change in agricultural policy in half a century. We’ve shown the world new ways to farm before and we have some of the very best farmers. This is our chance to innovate and set the pace once again, so that a decade from now the rest of the world will to be coming here to the UK to see how sustainable food production is done.
RT HON GEORGE EUSTICE MP