Speeches by Eagle.

“Yes, I am happy to write to you with the latest iteration of the membership.”

“Okay.”

“I absolutely hear you, but I am not going to comment on a current planning issue.”

“You have made your point about that particular local issue very strongly.”

“I am not trying to say that we should put solar on grouse moors. I am trying to establish the size of the issue. I think that it goes to 0.4% by 2030, which is still about half as much as we use for golf courses at the moment.”

“I can’t either.”

“There is farming representation.”

“It is a question of scale. I do not know the details of the application in your constituency and I certainly would not want to comment on things that are live going through planning. At the moment, 0.1% of land in England is under use for solar. Half of that is also used for food production, usually by sheep grazing at…”

“One has to produce food. One also has to have somewhere to live. Planning authorities are all about deciding how to do that. The land use framework, when it is published, will be a tool for deciding how those balances need to be struck. They have always been struck, over the years, as we have developed as an economy. T…”

“They are represented.”

“Yes, of course, but we have to get our own house in order before we can lecture other people about it. You say we import feed. We do, but a lot of our arable land is taken up growing feed for the animals that we raise in this country. I think that when I last looked, staggeringly, it was 70%.”

“If you look at the structure of farms by the land that they own and the size of the companies that run them, there are very large farms at the top that produce a far larger percentage of our food than the land percentage that they are farming. There is then a very long tail of family farming businesses as well. We have…”

“That is the first I have heard of it. I do not know who is putting that rumour around. The intention is to have a food strategy. If somebody is saying that, it is the first I have heard of it. That does not mean it is not true.”

“I agree with you. Nature recovery can and does support food production. We have to change the way we have done things in the past, not only to deal with farm pollution, which is really important. The more we deal with other greenhouse gases, the bigger the percentage farming pollution will become if we do not tackle it…”

“We have to look to see what we can do. This is part of the resilience issue. We have this paradox of having flooding and drought at the same time. My colleague Minister Hardy is looking to see what can be done with respect to shifting water resources around, so that they can be where they are more needed. That is more …”

“Yes, but it supports almost like collective organisations to try to sell, and only 20% of the horticulture sector uses them. We have to start looking at the particular needs of the horticulture sector. Some of that is with respect to energy, some of it is with planning issues for glasshouses and polytunnels, and some o…”

“No. It was a legacy EU scheme that we do not intend to continue. It creates producer organisations, which only 20% of the horticulture sector actually uses. We need to support the horticulture sector in a different way than using an old EU scheme. The horticulture sector has its particular issues and I am very interest…”

“It is about price, but it is also about production, productivity and producing food that is nutritious without having to spend as much to do it. Some of that is about input prices. Some of it is about energy prices. It is a very complex issue, but it is certainly one that we have eyes on across Government.”

“That is an issue for the Chancellor. The thing about things like the sugar tax is that they incentivise the food industry to recalibrate the way it makes and produces particular foods to reduce sugar, in this case, and reformulate what it does. There are also issues with salt and other unhealthy ingredients. Working cl…”

“But it probably was a Minister—I do not know; I was not there—who decided to increase the number of things that you could apply for from SFI ’23 from 23 to well over 100.”