Part of 1. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Energy, Planning and Rural Affairs – in the Senedd at 2:00 pm on 7 November 2018.
I'm not sure you could possibly respond for every single farmer in your constituency with one view, because that's clearly not the case. I mentioned we've had 12,000, and I'm not disrespecting what you're saying about your mail bag, but I've seen a lot of correspondence that absolutely agrees that basic payment schemes shouldn't be kept. So, we can't generalise; we have to analyse all the responses.
If I can just address some of the points you make. Active farming is really important, and active farming will be absolutely at the heart of our new land management scheme. Food production cannot be a public good; it's got a market. There is no market for public goods, and what we're attempting to do with the public goods scheme, and what we want to do, is make sure that farmers are paid for public goods, for which there is no market at the moment. So, the air quality, the soil quality, the water quality—they don't get paid for that at the moment. We need to ensure that that changes.
Food production—I've made it very clear that the economic resilience scheme is around productivity. We've seen productivity go down in the agricultural sector, and we want to ensure that it's now raised. So, food production is absolutely at the heart of the economic resilience scheme. Again, I'll go back to what I said in a previous answer: I don't want anybody to think that there is not a need for farming businesses to be supported; we've made that very clear. Both the First Minister and I have said, any agricultural funding—. And let's be clear about this—your Government in London hasn't told us of any funding that we're going to get post Brexit for agriculture, so ring fencing nothing is not going to do anything for our farmers, is it? So, until we get that assurance, I suggest the Conservative Party are very, very careful.