Labour to offer more slurry infrastructure cash if it wins power

Shadow farming minister Daniel Zeichner MP has said a future Labour government would pay farmers more to upgrade their slurry infrastructure to tackle water pollution.

Mr Zeichner, who was speaking at the Labour Party’s conference in Liverpool this week, suggested farm businesses would not be able to make the transition without proper support.

See more: 4 things we learned from Conservative conference

Farmers are already able to apply for grants to improve on-farm slurry storage and buy slurry management equipment, with over £180m made available for this purpose over the coming years.

But Mr Zeichner said he wanted to offer “more help and support, possibly even more than the government is giving” in this space.

“This may be one of the ways we can make a significant difference,” he told a Sustain, Nature Friendly Farming Network and Labour Climate and Environment Forum event.

“But it’s not going to be a magical overnight solution, because we’re still expecting people to produce stuff for certain prices and make sure the food system can operate.

“Unless they’ve got the tools to do it, it can be hard for them. So we’ve got to help them.”

Mr Zeichner’s comments came shortly after shadow Defra secretary Steve Reed told a separate event, organised by Onward, that he was listening to the “very serious concerns” farmers have about the Environmental Land Management (ELM) scheme.

Though he promised to keep the ELM scheme to maintain stability, he added: “Large parts of it seem to be financially unviable. It cannot work if it doesn’t stack up financially.”

There was however, no firm commitment from either minister that Labour would increase the overall agriculture budget.

Pressed by Farmers Weekly for a figure in light of recent NHS funding pledges from the Party, Mr Zeichner said: “It’s very hard to have rational discussions on budgets in this country.

“Some of us can remember right back to elections in the 1990s where basically, the Conservatives totted up a whole range of things we have said and try and run an election campaign on that.

“If they were prepared to do decent politics, we could do decent politics, but they’re not. So the answer is wait and see.”