Opinion: Prime minister Andy Burnham has discovered farming

During a recent visit to a South West farm, he declared that Britain’s ability to grow its own food is a matter of national security, placing food production alongside energy and defence.

To underline the point, he announced a £65m drought package for farmers: £50m to top up the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) budget to £290m and £15m to support on-farm reservoirs, alongside promises of simpler water-sharing arrangements and faster abstraction licence decisions.

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We can be hopeful this is the start of a genuine sea change in government policy - a welcome recognition that farming is exposed to an increasingly dangerous mix of global volatility, climate pressure and war-induced fragility.

Yet I still fear we have simply watched the latest episode of a new reality TV show: Made in Westminster.

Any practical help in a drought matters greatly but the uncomfortable truth is that this is not new money.

It is a reprioritisation from within DEFRA’s (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) existing farming budget.

In other words, £65m of activity that was presumably important before the prime minister’s farm visit has now been moved elsewhere – dropped, delayed or diluted to pay for it.

For more mature readers, the drought package announcement could easily have been the closing scene from Yes, Prime Minister: Jim Hacker solemnly presenting the latest cunning wheeze to appease a desperate, parched and financially fragile farming industry, while Sir Humphrey Appleby smiles knowingly in the background.

For younger readers, politics increasingly resembles a rolling reality TV format.

The formula is familiar.

Something serious happens.

Talking heads argue.

Ministers issue a pledge.

Social media fills with carefully framed images of the Prime Minister or a secretary of state, sleeves rolled up, visibly ‘doing something’.

That may be how modern politics now communicates, but it is not a practical way to secure a resilient food and farming sector.

In East Anglia, water security is arguably the single most important pillar of future food production.

There is welcome acknowledgement that planning and abstraction rules must work better but the basic problem remains: at present, there is not enough reliable water for both people and food production in this region.

Yes, there are long-term proposals for new reservoirs and national infrastructure to move water into the East of England and I wrote about that in this column in July 2023.

But that is a 25-year, multi-billion-pound challenge.

It will not be solved by a £15m announcement designed to look good on a ministerial video clip.

Then there is SFI.

This month, when the second SFI26 application window is expected to open, we risk another game-show moment: a brief window, huge demand, anxious advisers and farmers trying to submit applications before the budget is exhausted, the website falters or the scheme is paused.

That is not strategy.

The contrast with Baroness Minette Batters’ Farming Profitability Review is striking.

That review did not call for another headline, another short-term pot or another communications exercise.

It pointed towards a much harder task: rebuilding farm profitability through fairer supply chains, better data, practical regulation, access to investment, innovation, skills and a proper long-term partnership between government and industry.

Its central message was that food security depends on profitable farm businesses.

That may sound obvious, but it is still too often missing from political decision-making.

If food and farming are now genuinely recognised as matters of national security, then government and industry need to work together to build a comprehensive plan for long-term resilience.

It must address water, soils, labour, investment, supply chain equity, climate adaptation and the economic reality of producing food in Britain.

It must be practical, properly funded and capable of surviving beyond one Parliament.

Above all, it needs cross-party support and leadership willing to make difficult, necessary decisions.

Put simply, a serious national food security plan and the reality-show politics of recent years do not mix.

Farming is too important, too complex and too urgent to be managed through knee-jerk announcements, recycled budgets and performative visits.

Britain’s farmers do not need another episode of Yes Minister, they need a plan.

• Andrew Knowles is chief executive of Framlingham-based farmers' co-operative Fram Farmers