Speeches by Newbury.

“Like many in Cannock Chase, I am glad that this reorganisation, which no one asked for and no one voted for, is finally nearing its conclusion. It is fair to say there was not a whole lot of consensus on council boundaries in Staffordshire, but there is consensus on wanting a combined authority, so that we can seize th…”

“Like many colleagues who have spoken, I pay tribute to Sir David Amess. Today, I make a speech that I never thought I would have to make, to pay tribute to a good friend, Councillor Shanika Mahendran, who passed away on 1 July at the age of just 28. I met Shanika in 2022 on the Next Generation programme run by the Loca…”

“It is a real pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mrs Hobhouse. Thank you for the reminder. I very sincerely thank the hon. Member for Horsham (John Milne) for leading the effort to secure this debate and for his incredibly powerful speech. His recounting of Susan’s final visit to Parliament and the words of her hus…”

“The Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee recently had the privilege of visiting New Zealand. We met an Innovate UK delegation promoting incredible British agri-tech innovations like cups that enable substrate-free hydroponics, vegetables that have 40 times the iron content, and AI analysis of drone, satellite …”

“8. What steps she is taking with Cabinet colleagues to support the agri-tech sector.”

“How will the work that has been done under the readiness fund—you mentioned the collaboration fund—reach a scale across the country to enable the changing focusing of public money elsewhere? That is a massive culture shift that will happen. It has taken us many years to get to a point with the SFI where it is simpler a…”

“The road map does also talk about, as you have said, scaling up nature markets, including BNG, which you have mentioned, but we know that recent Government policy changes are attempting to coax developers to build more homes by cutting nature restoration obligations, and that will inevitably dampen demand for BNG credi…”

“Going back to the Chair’s question, pretend that I am a farmer sitting in front of you and I am telling you that I barely have the time for a life beyond what I need to do on farm. I am struggling to access SFI countryside stewardship. I feel like they come and go before I even have a chance to think about it. How will…”

“I believe at least one of them is, yes. We recognise that we need to do a bit more work to get Opposition Members on board. As I said, we got these signatures together in quite a short period of time. We reached out to Opposition Members, and we hope that we will be able to get plenty more signed up.”

“Okay, thank you.”

“How do you see that working in terms of checking compliance? We know that DEFRA’s arm’s length bodies are under a lot of strain. Natural England has just shed 250 staff through voluntary redundancy. How will you make sure that the book is not thrown at people who are doing their best, not trying to game the system, whi…”

“Thank you for coming before us, Secretary of State. The road map sets out a vision for a growing role for private finance, nature markets and supply chain standards in farm support, while public funding would become more targeted. That is potentially a big gamble. If the market does not respond accordingly, that plan m…”

“What is the contingency plan if the markets are not in place? Will you, as you said, keep it under review? If we get to 2030 and it is not where we want it to be, will public supportbe pulled away as quickly?”

“As we have discussed previously, many farmers found previous iterations of the SFI to be incredibly complicated. I recently sat down with a livestock farmer in my home village. She said she has been struggling with the tapering of basic payments. I asked her about the SFI. She said she had never applied for any measure…”

“Of course. We started outreach to gather the signatures only last Wednesday, so it took us around 48 hours to get the signatures together. I think that shows quite strong interest. We wanted to get this into the system before recess. If we had more time, perhaps we would have got more signatures, but there is a strong …”

“I am sure we can, yes, and we would also be open to considering Westminster Hall as a potential alternative. I realise that you have a lot of demands on time in the Chamber, so that could be an alternative for a 90-minute debate, if that was more agreeable to the Committee.”

“Okay, thank you. Mike Wood made representations.”

“Thank you for your time and the time of your Committee members. My application is in relation to independent press regulation and the second phase of the Leveson inquiry. I should say that, since submitting the application last Friday, we have had an additional three signatures, taking it up to 24.”

“Okay, thank you.”

“Yes, we will have a question on that more specifically later, but that peer-to-peer learning is powerful. We have seen that it engenders a lot more trust and mutual understanding than anything that would come out from Government, just by the nature of farming and needing to understand where people are coming from. On a…”