Speeches by Creagh.

“Let me come on to species. I do not have the file or any of my briefings open, so I am speaking off the cuff. We have no plans to introduce lynx. I want to do things that will work and that have community buy-in. The beavers need to be the right animal in the right place. They are not going to be released next to railw…”

“Yes.”

“We saw some of that yesterday with the announcement about the seven new towns; again, you can start overlaying it. Pulling all these complex bits together is incredibly powerful. We are setting up a new unit in DEFRA and there is a new website—luff.gov.uk—but it needs to be constantly updated because things are constan…”

“It aligns as a foundation document. The LNRSs were set in progress by the previous Government, and when we came in we had a choice whether to stop them or carry on with work that is in flight. My belief is that no good work should go to waste and we do not want to stop good work. They are a really powerful convening to…”

“Whose map is that?”

“I am not the Farms Minister so I am not sighted yet.”

“I think it is for the next five years.”

“We are not making those decisions: we do not own the land. We have about 10% of the country that is managed land—we call it the public estate—such as Salisbury Plain. We are never going to be farming there because it is MOD land and we need it for training exercises and things like that. We are working with that part o…”

“Yes, and it is the beginning.”

“I do. What I would say is that early indications from Angela Eagle, my colleague who is the Farms Minister, are that we are keen to see more smaller farms coming into our nature schemes. We are trying to simplify, to crowd in more of those small farmers. Given there have been some historical underspends of the budget a…”

“It is £200 million through the Farming Innovation Programme up to 2030.”

“On productivity.”

“One of the sectors that we are looking at is horticulture because we import an awful lot of our broccoli, tomatoes and fruits, so there is the opportunity there to innovate; I do not know if innovation and more greenhouses count as intensification. There will be some land use changes. If you look at the rain maps and t…”

“Yes.”

“That is a great question. We cannot overstate the importance of the land use framework. It is the first time we have published a blueprint of how we want to make use of our limited land to both grow the food we need and power the economy, build homes and restore nature. The good news from the framework is that we have …”

“I don’t think so. We have Minette Batters’s farming roadmap.”

“Yes, that is capital grants just through one programme: the Farming Innovation Programme. Of course, agroforestry is an innovation because if you are planting trees and shading your crops, the answer is that you actually shelter the early wheat from the winds and the hottest sun, which in some cases can be in May. So t…”

“The process has taken a long time: 18 months.”

“The way the Government are structured, there are these silos. You might argue that they are artificial because actually everything is connected and everything relates to each other. I am not the Water Minister but water is an important part of what we are trying to do in the land use framework in terms of cleaner river…”

“I would disagree with that characterisation. We have a vision that is about using our land better; it is about continuing to enable farmers to grow the brilliant food that they grow, but stating clearly that climate change is real. There is a loss of the political consensus around that, which I bitterly regret. One of …”