Speeches by Creagh.

“The way the Government are structured, there are these silos. You might argue that they are artificial because actually everything is connected and everything relates to each other. I am not the Water Minister but water is an important part of what we are trying to do in the land use framework in terms of cleaner river…”

“Change is hard. One of the things I say is that no one has ever been sacked for doing nothing, so it is easy to just do status quo and have more claims on insurance and more crop failures.”

“We already have two big landscape long-term recovery schemes, again, started under the previous Government. Cumbria is one of the first ones where we are looking at how we hold more water on that peatland, on that landscape, how we improve water quality for that huge tourism destination that is the gorgeous Lake Distri…”

“I want farmers to make a profit; that is how they sustain their businesses. The evidence from solar is that you can achieve biodiversity net gain of up to 300%, so it can be incredibly biodiversity-rich. On some farms, if the solar panels are at a particular angle, they also graze animals alongside and the livestock en…”

“First, we have not updated the best and most versatile land classification for a couple of decades.”

“I don’t think it has been updated since 1987, so we are not even sure whether the data is right. We are going to publish that in 2028. It is unclear why it has taken 40 years to update this. Maybe it was something that no Government wanted to do; I genuinely do not know.”

“I understand it is mostly the Netherlands where the imported peat comes from; it also has tonnes of lowland peat. It obviously has a huge horticultural industry. On the carbon budgets, we do not know the answer to that.”

“The data is all out there, so they can look and see where their farm is. This is not about telling people how to use their land; it is about the potential for more efficient land use and developing tools and data to help people make better decisions. I remember having a conversation at a party with somebody who had a f…”

“I am the Nature Minister.”

“That is a great question. We cannot overstate the importance of the land use framework. It is the first time we have published a blueprint of how we want to make use of our limited land to both grow the food we need and power the economy, build homes and restore nature. The good news from the framework is that we have …”

“I don’t think so. We have Minette Batters’s farming roadmap.”

“One of the sectors that we are looking at is horticulture because we import an awful lot of our broccoli, tomatoes and fruits, so there is the opportunity there to innovate; I do not know if innovation and more greenhouses count as intensification. There will be some land use changes. If you look at the rain maps and t…”

“It is £200 million through the Farming Innovation Programme up to 2030.”

“On productivity.”

“Yes.”

“Yes, that is capital grants just through one programme: the Farming Innovation Programme. Of course, agroforestry is an innovation because if you are planting trees and shading your crops, the answer is that you actually shelter the early wheat from the winds and the hottest sun, which in some cases can be in May. So t…”

“I think it is for the next five years.”

“We are not making those decisions: we do not own the land. We have about 10% of the country that is managed land—we call it the public estate—such as Salisbury Plain. We are never going to be farming there because it is MOD land and we need it for training exercises and things like that. We are working with that part o…”

“Yes, and it is the beginning.”

“No barrier has yet emerged.”