Editor’s View: Farming Roadmap is as exciting as coleslaw
© iStockphoto “I am fully conscious of the importance of preserving national unity…but unity without action is nothing but futile carnage and I cannot be responsible for that.
“Vigour and vision are the supreme need at this hour.”
Not the words of Andy Burnham to outgoing prime minister Keir Starmer, but those of David Lloyd George as he outmanoeuvred prime minister Herbert Asquith to seize the premiership for himself in December 1916.
See also: New Farming Roadmap promises end to ‘chop and change’ policy
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Sir Keir is far from the first leader to be brought down by the perception of being a process-obsessed and plodding middle manager rather than a dynamic and inspirational leader that gets things done.
If the description seems fitting at the top, then it also is fitting of the departments that sit underneath it too, including Defra, and the agricultural parts of the devolved administrations.
Vigour and vision have not been prominent in recent years amid the chop and change of personnel, budgets withering in the face of inflation and the needs of farming falling between the cracks of different departments.
Just look at this week’s story on planning delays to projects in rural areas in Wales.
Hundreds and hundreds of applications slipping outside of targeted decision times, including one in Pembrokeshire first lodged in 2005.
Dither and drift can be seen in abundance everywhere it is looked for in our sector and beyond, with the primary example being the delay to plans to find a way to adequately fund the military that led to the recent resignation of the defence secretary.
All of which makes the publication of this week’s Farming Roadmap for English farming welcome, with the government setting out its ambitions for food production for the next 25 years.
It included Defra secretary Emma Reynolds’s recommitment to “food security being national security” – perhaps farming’s most famous cliché given how many times it has been trotted out without much explanation of what it means.
Indeed, there is no expectation that the department will go beyond its existing commitment to maintain domestic food production at current levels of 65% of total food and some 75% of food that can be produced here.
Also published in partnership with the Farming Roadmap is the government’s response to Baroness Minette Batters’ profitability review, making up a bundle of more immediate actions.
Full details were still scarce at time of going to press, but they included pushing on with EU dynamic alignment and bringing the Groceries Code Adjudicator into Defra.
None of these are bad policies in isolation, nor is the commitment to incentivise more nature-based solutions.
Yet I can’t foresee that there is a segment of food, farming or the environmental lobbies that will regard this as anything more than the equivalent of coleslaw at the barbecue – a useful addition, but no chance of changing the game.
Two years ago, the prime minister said he completely agreed with a statement from the head of the Army that the country must be ready to fight a war in three years.
Yet Defra is still stuck being a plodding Asquith rather than a dynamic Lloyd George – where is the vigour and vision to mobilise our sector to do its part?