19:02 The Lord Commissioner of Her Majesty’s Treasury (James Morris)

We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to strike a balance that works for our independent country—to let go of the railings of the sinking ship that is the EU’s highly bureaucratic common agricultural policy and its irrational system of area-based payments. I also recognise, as my hon. Friend said, that the farming sector currently faces huge challenges with the coronavirus crisis. Our environmental land management scheme will reward farmers for the vital environmental work that they do alongside feeding the nation, helping us to meet the targets that we will set through our Environment Bill so that we can fulfil our legally binding commitment to reach net zero by 2050 and leave the environment in a better state than we found it in.

We are optimistic and we are aiming high, so that we create a coherent policy, designed for our farmers, which rewards them properly for their work to improve the environment, creating new habitats, reducing flooding and helping to tackle climate change, and enables them to become more profitable by investing in new equipment, adding value to their product and improving transparency in the supply chain. That is our approach—tackling the causes of poor profitability, not masking them with an arbitrary area-based subsidy, so that farms of every size and in every part of our country, including Somerset, have a chance to thrive. The smaller firms that my hon. Friend mentioned should feel equally optimistic about the opportunities this bespoke way of doing things will bring for their businesses.

I would like to close by making this important point. Sustainable farming and food production can and, indeed, must go hand in hand. No one understands this better than our farmers right across the country. After all, the great outdoors is their office, day in and day out. After a hot summer and an incredibly wet winter, they are the first to feel the effects of climate change in our countryside, and they are hungry for change. This is our chance to do things differently and put our farmers, such as those in Somerset, at the very heart of our efforts to tackle the causes and consequences of climate change in a way that helps nature recover too. I hope that hon. Members will all support the ambitious Agriculture Bill currently making its way through this place, so that we can chart a new course for English agriculture for decades to come and a new way of doing things for the world to follow.

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