Political parties need to listen to their electorate

My pal Rod invited me to fish on the River Spey in September, an offer too good to pass up. I felt peace and inner calm on the riverbank in the warm September sun, as the waters flowed soothingly past, particularly as my line was not once bothered by the inconvenience of a fish.

As I thrashed the water, a well-fed and carefree otter swam past within a couple of feet – taunting my lack of success. My host eventually informed me that despite fishing that beat every year, the last time he caught a fish there was a quarter of a century ago. For some people, the journey is more important than the destination.

This is definitely the case with the wandering Ministers of DEFRA. The Agriculture Department has been poorly served over the past few years by a steady stream of ministers on the way up or down the river of success.

Steve Barclay is the 8th Secretary of State since Liz Truss left the office in 2016. George Eustice was the only one who knew anything about farming, but he was blinded by ambition and unwilling to defend or champion it until after he left office, when lo and behold, the trade deals he had been proud of weeks before were suddenly not good deals. If the opinion polls are to be believed, Mr Barclay will only be in post for a year in any case before a Labour government.

Enter stage left, Steve Reed, the new shadow Secretary of State for the Environment Food and Rural Affairs for Labour. You probably haven’t heard of him yet, but if he remains in this role, he is likely to be shaping UK Ag policy for the next five years, and the decisions he takes will have a big effect on Ag policy in Scotland, for although Agriculture is devolved, the funding pot is not.

Again, he has no background knowledge of agriculture, but he is said to be in listening mode, so let’s hope he listens to the right people and comes to sensible conclusions.

The listening should start with the recent Lord's Report on Horticulture. Its deep analysis of the Horticulture sector, led by peers with long experience and understanding of the industry, is disturbing, comprehensive, and thoroughly accurate, recognizing as it does the huge threat this immensely important sector is under, and the observations and recommendations it makes are crystal clear. There are too many recommendations to list them all, but here are some of the key ones:

1. We recommend in common with the EFRA Committee’s recent recommendation that the Government should develop a suite of key food security indicators—from farm inputs and retailer outputs—to monitor and ensure food security and report annually as committed to by the Prime Minister. In addition, the Government must, as a priority, define targets for food self-sufficiency and set itself statutory reporting duties against those targets together with key food security indicators. Defra should, as a matter of urgency, reconsider its interpretation of international rules and consider barriers to promoting British food.

2. The Government should review available incentives for energy-intensive horticultural businesses to transition to renewable energy in order to build resilience to future energy shocks and make progress towards net zero.

3. The Government must recognise horticulture as an energy-intensive industry and add it to the list of sectors eligible for the ETII scheme.

4. Reforms should be made to how seasonal workers are taxed to allow them to retain more of their earnings. A dedicated seasonal workers’ tax code should be introduced under which no income tax is levied until the worker has reached the annual tax threshold. The pension auto-enrolment and National Insurance enrolment obligations should be removed. Employer National Insurance should be allocated to refund the costs of visa and travel for seasonal workers.

5. The Government must reform the apprenticeship levy to meet the needs of horticultural businesses. Flexibility should be introduced to support the delivery of training in rural settings, for example, a removal or lowering of minimum thresholds for attendees for training courses. There should be greater flexibility around the use of the apprenticeship levy to support the “bite-size learning” of specific skill sets to up-skill existing workforces. The Government must open up the apprenticeship levy to seasonal workers or provide an alternate training scheme for them to support SMEs who rely on this workforce.

6. The Committee agrees with the EFRA Committee that the Government should set out how it will ensure continued fertiliser production in the UK. The Fertiliser Industry Taskforce must make good on its promise to increase transparency in the fertiliser market to help mitigate the effects of price volatility by working closely with the industry on a regular basis. In the long term, the Taskforce must take note of our recommendations on R&D with a view to reducing dependence on nitrogen and phosphorous-based fertilisers.

7. The Government must conduct and publish its review of fairness in the horticultural supply chain as soon as possible and include ornamentals within its scope.

A few blunt observations to conclude –

1. New Agriculture Ministers don’t generally have much previous experience in the industry.

2. Lack of experience is often made worse by Ministers not being in post long enough to gain an understanding, and much time is wasted bringing a new inexperienced minister up to speed.

3. The agriculture brief doesn’t need to be massively political – there is much cross-party agreement on rural affairs. The Lord's report on Horticulture would be a good starting point to reach across political divides and try to provide the stable political and economic environment that Agriculture in general, and Horticulture in particular, so desperately need. A universally agreed policy would not then be hindered by a change of government.

4. One last point – Political parties need to listen to their electorate, and in Scotland in particular, the electorate has a strong rural component. If they don’t, the electorate is likely to give them a black eye every so often.

That reminds me of a story my brother told me about a fishing holiday in Ireland, and as is very often the way with such trips, he found himself deep in philosophical conversation with a young Irish fellow in a smoky pub over a pint of Guinness. The chap had a huge black eye and after an hour’s conversation, my brother felt the ice had broken sufficiently to enquire how he came about it.

The answer was brief – “I was talking when I should have been listening.”