Our Countryside and our Farmers matter!

 

While living in an urban town most of my life, I have previously lived in a rural area and recognise the huge importance of the countryside to our national life. Both urban and rural living have pluses and minuses, but both are needed to sustain the other in today’s world. 

The governing Labour Party are an urban-based party and have little understanding of the countryside. In the same way that none of the Labour Government’s Cabinet have no real experience of working in business, the vast majority if not all of them (I would expect) don’t represent any predominately rural constituencies. 

This matters because this lack of understanding of the countryside is leading to bad policy decisions. Our countryside is under attack from Labour politicians who don’t understand it. The government are planning a huge concreating over of much of our countryside to accommodate record population growth, rather than address the issues contributing to it. Make no mistake, the west of Ifield proposals are nailed-on to happen under Labour.  

Then there’s farming. Our food security is important and the Covid pandemic and its aftermath, showed we can’t always take having all types of food readily available for granted. We already import between 42% and 50% of all the food we consume, which doesn’t feel very environmentally friendly. This makes us very vulnerable to future unforeseen global events.

Our farmers not only feed us, they play a huge role in managing and looking after the countryside, and a significant national economic role, being the backbone of the rural economy. We need to produce more food domestically, not less. The Labour Government’s attack on farmers is wrong. A farmer’s life is not easy and has many challenges, but the ability to pass on the family farm to the next generation is what makes a lifetime of hard work rewarding. Labour’s budget changes to inheritance tax will force farmers to sell off land to pay new huge tax bills. This could be the ending of the British family farm as we know it. It’s wrong and I stand in solidarity with our farmers.

Standing up for the Hospitality industry

 

The hospitality industry is the third largest employer in the UK, employing about 3.5 million people and contributing £93 billion to our economy. In 2022, hospitality generated £54 billion in tax receipts, £20 billion in exports, and attracted £7 billion in business investment. Put simply, hospitality matters, for our economy and for people’s livelihoods. 

During the pandemic, the sector was strongly supported by the then Conservative Government, with hundreds of thousands of jobs saved. Since the pandemic, the sector has faced significant challenges. Inflation, especially in relation to energy costs and rising food prices, has had a major impact.

The Labour Government’s Budget a fortnight ago could be ‘the straw that breaks the camel’s back’. At the weekend, a large number of industry leaders from the hospitality sector wrote to the government, highlighting their “grave fears” about the impact of the Budget.

Their letter makes for stark reading. They are concerned about the increase in Employers National Insurance, especially relating to the much-reduced threshold that it will paid at. They say that alongside the changes to the national minimum wage levels, these changes this will cost the hospitality sector an estimated £3.4bn a year.

That is not sustainable given the existing pressures. The sector, and with it thousands of jobs, are staring into the abyss. The letter says that the changes to the Employers NI threshold are regressive in their impact on lower earners and will impact flexible working practices which many older workers and parents rely upon. Quoting from the letter, they say “Unquestionably they will lead to business closures and job losses within a year.” 

The letter goes on to state that there is no capacity to pass the costs onto customers, as businesses would be reluctantly forced to raise prices by 6-8% which would fuel inflation, but this couldn’t be realistically done as many customers are at the end of their ability to pay more.

Tragically, unless the Labour Government reconsiders at least their reducing of the threshold that Employers NI is paid at, I fear a wave of future closures in Crawley and beyond in hospitality.