Here are the climate-related sections of speeches by MPs during the Commons debate Land Use Change: Food Security.
Tom Gordon (Liberal Democrat)
The right hon. Lady has talked a lot about housing and development infringement upon the green belt. An issue in my area, around the village of Scotton, is the proposal for a huge solar farm. While I completely agree and want to see that the targets and net zero are reached, does the right hon. Lady agree that rather than using prime agricultural land, we should be looking at the roofs of distribution warehousing and other alternatives first?
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14:54 John Milne (Liberal Democrat)
In my constituency of Horsham, the peaceful rural village of Cowfold has experienced a bewildering surge of applications for green energy projects. Locals could be forgiven for thinking that the industrial revolution has arrived a couple of hundred years late. Why is that happening? I think the point the hon. Member is making is that it is all about the scarcity of connections to the national grid. Does he agree that we need a coherent national strategy for land use that, crucially, carries weight in planning applications? Right now, we are victims in a wild west of market-driven developments.
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14:54 Terry Jermy (Labour)
There is three times more grade 5 agricultural land in the UK than grade 1 land, yet solar installations occupy a staggering 22 times more grade 1 than grade 5. That is of huge concern. We are already seeing longer and hotter summers, particularly in Norfolk, and there are challenges for farmers; irrigation is needed more frequently, adding to costs, and more land is becoming unviable for food production as a result of climate change.
Let me be clear: I am not against the use of solar panels, and I back the Government’s ambitious goals to achieve net zero by 2050. Absolutely nobody would thank the Government for not doing everything they can to ensure the power is there to keep the lights on. The complete lack of action by the last Conservative Government on energy security has left us dangerously exposed—but food security is also important. The UK already imports a staggering 46% of its food. We grow only 15% of our own fruit and 53% of our own vegetables, making us one of the world’s largest food importers. A recent Government Food Security report found that we are 63% self-sufficient, down from 95% just 50 years ago. I appreciate that there are certain types of food we cannot grow and we need to look abroad for them, but why are we importing 2 million metric tonnes of potatoes annually?
A recent report by the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, of which I am a member, found that DEFRA has no effective system of oversight for border checks, with inadequate and sometimes even banned products passing into the UK. The president of the NFU also believes the UK is not prepared to feed itself in a crisis, with specific reference to the consequences of the current climate crisis.
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Chris Hinchliff (Labour)
Returning to food security, it has been far too long since we have taken the issue seriously. We have grown complacent in the surety that, as a rich nation, we can import all we want and need. With the worsening climate emergency, however, it would now be entirely unwise to assume that we can continue to rely on those supply chains—when Valencia next floods, we will remember that to our cost—or to step back from trying to achieve net zero. The threat of flooding from climate change to so much of our best agricultural land is too great for that to make any sense, with 95% of grade 1 land in the east of England already at risk of flooding.
We must urgently update our agricultural land classification. The system we use to determine potential farmland productivity is desperately out of date. It uses rainfall data from 1941 to 1970 and temperature measurements from 1961 to 1980. The impacts of climate change are already being severely felt on our farmland and intensive farming is degrading soils, with 5.3 million tonnes of organic carbon lost from our soils every year, so the likelihood is that the current agricultural land classification system substantially overestimates land productivity. We must update it.
When we consider energy security, Government contracts for difference ensure a minimum price that gives suppliers the confidence to invest in the production needed to secure national policy objectives. Food security is no less essential than energy security, and farming practices that restore nature are as important as the transition to renewable energy. A Government serious about making genuine food security profitable to produce should establish new contracts for food security based on the contracts for difference mechanism in the energy sector, providing certainty through price floors for the key produce necessary to meet the nation’s nutritional needs. That is how we can achieve genuine food security.
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15:09 Roz Savage (Liberal Democrat)
As already mentioned, at the moment the UK imports about 40% of its food, and for fruit and vegetables that proportion is even higher. In 2023, after Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, food price inflation reached its highest point in 45 years, adding to the pain of families already struggling to afford the basics. Food and energy sovereignty are not abstract concepts—they are the foundations of a healthy population and a resilient nation—yet sadly, some of the actions taken by the Government since launching the land use framework conversation suggest that they see land as a zero-sum game. House building is pitted against biodiversity, and renewable energy projects come at the expense of food production. That is not going to work.
I will make a couple of points. First, we must recognise the need to move beyond departmental silos and work across Departments in a truly systemic, holistic approach. At the moment, it all feels rather piecemeal, which leaves farmers, councils and communities grappling with apparently contradictory demands. We need a genuinely multi-functional, multi-layered land use framework—one that recognises each piece of land’s ability to meet multiple needs at once. The amazing pilot programmes conducted by the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission show what is possible. These pilots in Devon and Cambridgeshire show that co-ordinated planning can support housing, energy, transport, net zero, biodiversity, food production and nature recovery all at the same time.
Planning decisions must reflect the local geography, economies, needs and opportunities, and they must incorporate the detailed local knowledge of residents. If not, their implementation will likely fail and they will not be welcomed by our communities. In my constituency, housing targets have doubled under the Government’s house building plans. The proposed 2,000 acre Lime Down solar farm would remove a huge area of farmland from production, which is causing huge local concern and pushback. Of course it is true that we need to decarbonise and protect our natural environment, but that does not need to come at the expense of local communities and food production capability.
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15:14 Roz Savage (Liberal Democrat)
My second and last point is that our farmers need clarity and support. Henry Dimbleby’s national food strategy describes the vicious cycle where agriculture both contributes to climate change and is threatened by it. Instead of breaking the cycle, the Government are creating an economic environment that pushes farmers towards damaging practices, such as excessive fertiliser use and intensive animal agriculture, because farmers see no other viable option if they are to stay in business. From speaking with my farmers across South Cotswolds, I know that they are keen to be allies in tackling climate change and biodiversity loss, but they are being met with mixed messages and one economic blow after another, such as the family farm tax and the abrupt end of the SFI, as has been mentioned. Those decisions undermine both climate resilience and farmers’ livelihoods.
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15:42 Angela Eagle (Labour)
We also face challenges to the resilience of domestic food production systems from soil degradation, disease and climate change. Those are critical long-term risks, but we should be clear that the impacts are here today. We need only speak to a farmer whose fields were underwater last winter and then parched and drought-ridden this summer. They would say that that is not a theoretical risk, but a threat to food production today. That is a threat we can manage because we need to take climate change seriously and do something about it, as we do with more conventional threats.
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15:50 Angela Eagle (Labour)
Boosting the resilience of our food system will prepare it better for supply chain shocks and disruption. Some of what we have to do is ensure resilience to climate change, which will make us more resilient in the way in which we produce food. Environmental changes therefore go hand in hand with protecting food production. If we do not make our landscapes more resilient and more sustainable environmentally, it is likely that the productivity of our land will decline and it will be harder as the climate changes for us to guarantee reasonable food production. Some of those things bolster each other and should not be set against one another, as the right hon. Member for Aldridge-Brownhills said in her opening remarks. They can produce a more effective and more resilient result if we do them effectively and properly.
We already manage the resilience of domestic production through updated environmental land management schemes. The good news is that actions taken today to manage these immediate risks can also reduce the risk from climate change. There is a £7 billion farming budget focused on improving the resilience of our food systems. That maintains the Government’s commitment to farming, food security and nature’s recovery. It includes £5.9 billion for environmental farming schemes, £816 million for tree planting and £385 million for peatland restoration, all of which is vital for sustainability.
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