Rural Affairs and Islands Committee 03 September 2025
Within the remit of the committee specifics, you mentioned the rural support plan, for example. If we look in that space, it will be incumbent on the £650 million of public money that is spent on supporting agriculture, the food industry and the supply chains, because that is leveraged to deliver against those outcomes.
Dennis Overton has helpfully mentioned one of the biggest challenges. Without looking after nature and without a stable climate, we do not have food production—full stop. We have some major challenges to address in that space.
There is a lot of reference in the good food nation plan document to the various policies that are being brought forward and that will, in theory, form part of that rural support plan, but the reality is that very little of that money is being applied directly to deliver nature and climate-friendly farming or to support shorter supply chains, organic agriculture and the delivery of the organic action plan. When you start to delve away and you know about a sector or an area, you see a disconnect between what is happening in the sectoral policy and what is being stated in terms of delivering the outcomes in the plan. I am sure that others who are much more knowledgeable than I am in areas such as health, education and food poverty would probably say the same. We are not leveraging public money in those spaces to deliver the outcomes that we are all saying that we back and are behind. Dennis is right that there is not much contention around those outcomes. There is a lot of support for them and for the ambitions and visions of the plan. It is really about how we do joined-up policy better to deliver that.