Farmers ‘should keep’ £3bn subsidy payments

A report, by Jim Gerrard, from the Countryfile Live Brexit Debate attended by The Oxford Farming Conference Director, Tom Allen-Stevens and chaired by former OFC Director, Charlotte Smith, BBC Radio 4.

British farmers should continue to receive around £3bn of public money after Brexit, but opinion’s divided over how the money should be spent.

‘Should farming subsidies be scrapped after Brexit?’ was the title of the debate on the Saturday of the Countryfile Live event, held at Blenheim Palace from 3-6 August. 

The panel, chaired by former Oxford Farming Conference director and BBC Countryfile presenter Charlotte Smith, consisted of Dame Helen Ghosh, director general of the National Trust, George Dunn, chief executive of the Tenant Farmers Association, Minette Batters, deputy president of the NFU, and Professor Dieter Helm, official fellow in economics at New College, Oxford. 

“Subsidies should end,” stated Dame Helen Ghosh. “Instead, the public should pay for what no one else can pay for, such as wildlife, soils and the natural landscape.”
Minette agreed that the CAP hadn’t delivered for the whole environment. “But in recent years, farmers have established over 37,000km of grass margins and 30,000km of hedgerows,” she pointed out.

Professor Helm had strong views on subsidies, and although being a firm supporter of the ‘remain’ campaign, he stated “one significant merit (of Brexit), is that we’re going to get rid of CAP.” 

However, Charlotte then put a vote out to the audience on whether they wanted £3bn of public money spent on agriculture and the environment. It was a unanimous vote in favour of subsides, which came as a surprise to some of the panellists. 

In terms of future funding, Professor Helm said: “farmers should come forward and bid for subsidies.” He then went on to launch an attack on the earnings of the National Trust and what it receives in terms of subsidies.

Putting Helen on the spot, she responded that the Trust would be “happy to give up” the Basic Payment it receives – around £9M of a total farm subsidy payment of £12M. 

Breaking the tension, Ms Batters went on to make reference to the 2011 Future of Food and Farming report by Sir John Beddington, and how it addresses food security. She said it was “wholly immoral that the government still doesn’t have one item of a food policy on the table.”

Mr Dunn went on to say that we must “ensure the supply chain operates correctly”, in relation to food security.  This was followed on by Dieter emphasising that there are “serious issues with food policy as well as serious issues with welfare and competition, which need to be sorted out. The CAP has raised the price of food.” But this was a point Minette denied. 

Ms Smith then turned the debate to the subject of trade, and Ms Batters  made a fundamental point of how a constructive debate on subsidies was limited until a trade deal was settled. “This (trade agreement) will change the landscape more significantly than anything since the repeal of the Corn Laws – this change is that important,” she said.

Mr Dunn described, “Brexit is like holding a blanket, and we’ve got to hold every bit of that blanket to keep it off the floor. We’ve got to talk about trade, subsidies, labour, standards, regulations all at the same time and we’ve got to get a composite deal for all of those.”

Professor Helm agreed that clarity is needed on a trade deal before decisions are made. “The whole of the Brexit discussion, across the whole economy, starts with the questions:

‘Do you want to be in the single market?’ ‘Do you want to have a customs union?’, “What trading relations do you want?’ 

“Farming is in the same boat as everybody else –basically, until we have some clarity about what we’re doing with our trading relationships with the European Union, how can we sort everything else out?”

The audience then had their say with several questions fired at the panel. When asked whether anything could be taken from the way New Zealand scrapped subsidies, it was agreed all round that the brutality in the way in which they were scrapped should not to be repeated in the UK.

One member of the audience stated she was happy for public money to be spent on delivering public goods, such as environmental improvements, but not on investing in individual farm businesses to help them become more profitable.

Ms Batters pointed out such support is needed because farmers’ profitability depends entirely on commodity markets over which they have no influence. “You have to treat food differently,” she said.

Local farmer and OFC director Tom Allen-Stevens asked whether those in charge are capable of delivering a trade agreement. Concerns were raised over the divisions in parliament, the time in which decisions need to be made and how they are going to be made.