Speeches by Reed.

“In what terms? What are you talking about?”

“Everybody gets their inheritance tax exemptions. An individual with a property can pass on £500,000. That can be transferred to a spouse. If they predecease—”

“If they are married or civil partners. That takes it up to £1 million. Each individual can have an APR allowance of £1 million. It may not be restricted to a couple. There may be other people involved as well. It starts to get complicated, because you are talking about very different circumstances, case by case. The be…”

“From the data projections, the vast majority of farmers will still pay nothing.”

“I agree very much with the points you are making. Within the £5 billion over the next two years for sustainable farming, of course, sits SFI. A lot of farmers have said that they have found it difficult to get into SFI, so we are simplifying it, making it easier to get into and increasing the number of actions that SFI…”

“Yes. Biosecurity is essential to farming, isn’t it? We have seen issues already with avian influenza in Yorkshire—hopefully contained to that one incident because of rapid intervention. We have seen bluetongue, and hopefully, the very cold weather we have just got will help to deal with that. But by putting in restrict…”

“Yes, of course I recognise the strain, but we had to plug that multibillion-pound black hole in the public finances—”

“Whatever happens, the consumers will not be taking on the up-front capital cost, because the purpose of the review is to bring in investment from private sector investors into the sector, who will then be looking at a long-term, low but fair return on that investment. That is how we can keep customer bills affordable d…”

“Yes, with that context understood, something in the budget therefore had to give. It was important to protect SFI because that is transitioning farming to a model that will be more environmentally and financially sustainable. Those are benefits that we want the farming sector to get, but also it is more nature-positive…”

“My colleague, who has a head for detail, is here with me. She will give you the exact numbers.”

“Would you like us to send that information to the Committee or to the individual member?”

“Yes, sure.”

“I think you heard earlier—so I won’t repeat all of it—that we are trying to simplify SFI, so that it is easier to get into, particularly for those farmers who have told us that they found it very difficult to get into in the first place. We are also dramatically increasing the number of actions that you can get funded …”

“Yes, I do, because most farmers will not be affected by it. I have already explained—I won’t do it again, because the Chair will rap my knuckles—the various interventions that we have to help farmers become more profitable and to incentivise them to invest, because they will get a return on that investment faster.”

“Farmers having discretion in this is important, because people are much more willing to go on a journey if it is a journey they want to go on. If there was a sense of coercion, I do not think that would happen. But I also think that sensible business owners of any kind, including in food production and farming, want to…”

“We need co-ordination across Government to get this right. Within DEFRA, early in the new year, we will publish a consultation on the land use framework that will look at how we balance nature’s recovery with food production. Those are the parts that DEFRA will be responsible for. There are other spatial strategies in …”

“I think it will have to, because in some cases, the same land is used for multiple purposes. But at least by going out with these consultations and developing these strategies, and by defining what it is we want to achieve, we are much more likely to be able to achieve it. I will make a more general point. I am talking…”

“The points you make are very important. If anyone was not aware that food security is national security, what happened in Ukraine, in the Red sea and during the pandemic would have shown them that it is. The answer is not to close the borders and try to produce everything we want to eat in this country, but we need an …”

“We have the food security reports that will be published in December. That will give you a hell of a lot of metrics around what food security looks like.”

“Well, there is a whole load of data in there and that is what we will be looking at. At the core, food security is about a secure and resilient supply of good-quality, accessible, affordable food. But there are so many metrics that will come into that, you will need to give me time to—”