The UK environment secretary has promised to reform the food system to ensure farmers are paid fairly for the food they produce, after many filled the streets of Westminster to campaign against inheritance tax changes.
Speaking at the Country Land and Business Association (CLA) conference, Steve Reed said: “I heard the anguish of the countryside on the streets of London earlier this week. We may not agree over the inheritance tax changes, but this government is determined to listen to rural Britain and end its long decline.”
Reed added he was going to No 10 to tell Starmer about the gulf between the rural and urban communities, which he said needed to be bridged urgently. CLA figures show the rural economy is 16% less productive than the national average.
Thousands of farmers demonstrated in central London on Tuesday to protest against changes to agricultural property relief, which mean farms worth more than £1m that are passed on to the family when the owner dies will have to pay a 20% tax on the remainder of the value.
But many, including the president of the National Farmers’ Union, Tom Bradshaw, said this change was the “final straw” after decades of neglect. After many years of being squeezed by supermarkets to the point where farmers receive just 1p for every loaf of bread or block of cheese sold, and seeing their subsidies disappear after Brexit, farmers are desperate, he said. Incomes have plummeted as extreme weather hits yields, and now farmers also fear being unable to pass on a viable business to descendants.
To address this, Reed announced the government would consult on a new 25-year farming roadmap and said he would make changes to the supply chain to ensure farmers got a fair price for their produce. “I’m not prepared to let so many farmers keep working so hard for so little,” he said.
Of the roadmap, he added: “This will be the most forward-looking plan for farming in our country’s history, with a focus on making farming and food production more profitable in the decades to come.”
Reed said the plan would be about “supply chain fairness”, meaning farmers would be paid fairly by those to whom they sell produce.
Reed said: “Across the whole supply chain, the producers, the farmers, the growers, get relatively little of the money that a product is sold for. And if there’s ever a problem in the supply chain – let’s say a contract is agreed and then energy prices shoot up – it’s quite often the producer or the farmer that has to bear the cost of that, and sometimes they end up selling their produce below the cost of producing it, and that’s not sustainable.”
Speaking at the conference, the president of the CLA, Victoria Vyvyan, accused the government of “taxing us out of existence” and embroiling rural people in a “stupid row about numbers”.
She said she felt she had been “marginalised and condescended to, told to calm down” and that farmers were “fearful of losing everything that they’ve worked for, borrowed for and hoped for”.
Reed said he hopes his plan would regain the countryside’s confidence, adding: “This isn’t just about one thing. It is something much wider, and we have basically a proportion of rural Britain out on the streets of London telling us, telling politicians and politics, that they feel ignored, alienated and disrespected, and that’s what they want to change … I think it’s not just about a single tax issue. It’s much, much, much bigger than that.”
