Editor’s View: Ask not what Defra can do for you
Steve Reed © NFU What should be the reasonable minimum expectation for the performance of a secretary of state when speaking at the NFU conference?
Defra secretary Steve Reed won plaudits on Tuesday (25 February) for turning up to speak to a roomful of farmers, given all the proverbial mud that has been slung his way over the planned changes to inheritance tax (IHT).
If you look at things in the short-term context, those who gave him a warm welcome are right.
See also: How life insurance can protect against IHT liability
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He certainly didn’t have to be there. But it’s a rather sadder indictment when you consider the longer term – even if you just think of the hope following the last election from some who anticipated a reset between government and farming with a new broom sweeping clean.
Instead, various parts of UK farming have now been in a state of protest for a year – 12 months have passed since Welsh farmers gathered in front of the Senedd with their placards.
And when that is the case, expectations are lowered from wanting to build a partnership to simply hoping for an outbreak of peace.
This is what environmentalists call “shifting baseline syndrome” – a concept normally used to refer to a continual lowering of expectations as to how many of a particular species in a particular habitat is “normal”.
Mr Reed came to talk to the delegates about his ambition to make farming profitable.
Historically that would have meant first payments for production, then payments for area; now it means payments for delivering (mostly) environmental services.
The most welcome updates he made this week were fixes to things that shouldn’t have been broken – longer-term certainty for seasonal agricultural worker visas and giving back money he’s taking away from legacy area payments.
There was nothing new to report on IHT, apart from the fact that yet another audience was, in equal parts, saddened and infuriated by his responses to the many questions on the subject, so I will leave that to one side.
Had the tax proposal not been tabled, I think most farmers would still have left the conference feeling dismayed at the paucity of the secretary of state’s ambition.
Yet when he talks of making businesses more resilient using the levers that are available to him (IHT not being in his gift), we should listen.
This help is welcome, but a smorgasbord of small things is the best we can reasonably hope for in future.
Economist Paul Johnson, who delivered the Henry Plumb Lecture at the conference, painted a troubling picture of our high national debt repayments and urgent spending needs elsewhere, including defence.
Alongside IHT, the national conversation we need to have as a sector is how we continue to confront the fact that the amount of help from government is almost certainly going to keep declining.
It is not going to try to hold back consolidation.
Deliberately or not, Defra and the Treasury are making a strategic bet that fewer farming businesses will not necessarily mean a reduced food supply.
So while a lower baseline expectation of what Mr Reed can do for us is regrettable, it is also realistic.