Tag: 2025

The speech made by Victoria Atkins, the Shadow Environment Secretary, in Manchester on 6 October 2025.

Thank you, everyone, and welcome to the Conservative Party Conference.

I extend a particular welcome to Oli and all the farmers here today.

We have invited farmers from across the country to our conference to see for themselves that we care, we are listening, and we have their backs.

You may have noticed that we are doing things a little differently this year.

I am not up on the main stage.

We are having a rally, in honour of the rallies that have happened across the country.

Over the past 12 months, Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer, the farmer harmer, have caused a nightmare for farming.

Just a year ago, she stood up and announced the family farm tax and the family business tax.

You have heard from Oli today about some of the problems this is already causing.

Under Kemi’s leadership, we opposed that policy immediately because we knew it would stop business investment.

It has done.

It would cost people’s jobs.

And It has done.

It was snatching families’ futures away.

We have marched with tens of thousands of farmers up and down Whitehall.

We have climbed into their tractors.

Two hundred and sixty-five thousand people have signed our petition to axe the tax.

We have done everything we can in Parliament to hold this socialist government to account and try to get them to U-turn.

We forced a vote.

We gave Labour MPs the chance to vote this tax down.

How many of them voted to axe this tax?

Zero, a big fat zero.

That is what we are dealing with.

I love dragging Labour ministers to the despatch box.

We do not have to put up with quite the same microphones in the chamber.

When I see Labour MPs sent out by their whips to defend the indefensible, hiding behind their AI-generated speeches like some sort of trade union automaton, I know they know they are wrong.

It is because of the pressure that farmers have kept up over the past 12 months, and us working together, that they are beginning to feel the pressure.

We must keep it up.

If Rachel Reeves tries a fudge at her budget in a desperate bid to save their rural seats, should this happen, be in no doubt: it is because of the campaigns of farmers across the country and the pressure we have put on them together.

However, if she does try to fudge it, it is too late.

The harm has already been done.

Unlike Keir Starmer, we have been listening to the heart-wrenching stories of family farms and farmers across the country.

The distress of families who simply do not know how they are going to pay these gigantic tax bills is palpable.

I was speaking to Joss today, 18 years old, desperate to carry on his farm, yet at that age, he is already worrying about the tax bill when, God forbid, his parents die.

That is not right.

That is shameful.

Cancer patients are genuinely refusing treatment now to avoid the deadline of next April because they know what it will cost their families if they live beyond that date.

Just think of that for a moment.

Then there are families already mourning the loss of loved ones who have taken the tragic step of taking their own lives to protect their farms and families from the clutches of Labour.

This is happening, and Labour are ignoring it.

These people’s lives and dreams have been shattered by this government.

Farmers will not forget, and neither will we.

It is shameful.

It is enraging.

It is an assault on the countryside.

We will not stand for it, and we will not back down.

I make this solemn promise to any farmers watching: we will axe the family farm tax and the family business tax when we are back in government, and we will keep fighting for you, because we know that a strong countryside makes a strong country.

In our first year, my fabulous team of Conservative Shadow DEFRA Ministers, Robbie, Neil, Massey, David, Ashley, Jerome, and Afra, have started as we mean to go on.

We have already dispatched one useless set of failing Labour ministers.

Goodbye, City Steve.

I shall almost miss him, but he has been reshuffled off to go and mess up housebuilding.

Instead, City Steve has been replaced with the City Minister from the Treasury, who is imposing these taxes.

You could not make it up.

They have gone from City Steve to Urban Emma, the tax inspector.

We know that these death taxes are not the only assaults on the countryside and the coast.

Eighteen months ago, many in rural, agricultural, and fishing communities lent their vote and gave Labour a chance.

My goodness, that Labour Party has completely let you down.

Apart from raising inheritance tax, they are raising so many other taxes I have not got time to list them.

They have cancelled SFI and other farm payments.

They have sunk the UK fishing industry with their EU deal.

They are ignoring food and water security, delaying biosecurity investment.

They are making rural services even harder to deliver by getting rid of the rural services grant.

They are bringing pubs and the hospitality sector to their knees, and much more.

You have told us that it is getting harder to pay the bills, to grapple with the red tape, to keep your businesses going.

This matters to us all, whether we live in the depths of the countryside or in the city.

Funnily enough, we all eat food, and as we know, the cost of food is climbing due to Labour’s policies.

Labour’s last budget is causing, in part, rising food prices, record farm closures, two pubs or restaurants closing a day, farms facing an SFI and custodianship scheme cliff edge, food producers facing a new tax this month, another one, on packaging, and 80 per cent of farmers fearing their farms will not survive.

This is a food and farming emergency.

If this emergency is not dealt with urgently, we will see even more farms, agribusinesses, food and drink manufacturers, and hospitality businesses close.

We will see workers laid off, tenant farmers evicted, food production tumble, and food prices continue to rise.

I hate to break it to you, but Labour is coming back for more in their budget.

We need to act fast and act together.

I am calling, before the budget, a food and farming emergency summit, where I shall bring farmers, food producers, and fishermen together to come up with the urgent solutions you need to address this emergency.

I am going to do something different.

Once we have those solutions, I shall put party politics to one side and offer them to the government at the budget.

I am doing this because we, as Conservatives, caring deeply about the countryside and our country, will always put our national interest first.

This will be a test for Labour.

If they ignore those policies, if they shun them, they will show that they are not to be trusted.

I put this challenge to the Labour government: you have not listened to the countryside so far.

Will you listen to us this time?

This is your countryside, your future, and we have your backs.

Responding to this Labour-inflicted emergency is only part of my plans for the future.

We are doing a lot of longer-term thinking for the years ahead and beyond the general election.

Just like farming, we need to plan in opposition.

Since the general election, I have been frank: we got some things right in government, and we got some things wrong.

We did a lot of good in farming and environmental policy, about which we can rightly be proud.

However, we lost our focus for a while on the primary purpose of farming: to grow food.

That changes now.

Food production and food security will be at the heart of Conservative agricultural and environmental policy.

We will start with DEFRA’s regulations and regulators.

Did you know DEFRA has one of the highest numbers of quangos in the whole of government?

However well-intentioned, this system of 34 quangos that regulate our land, our water, and our food, led by Natural England, is outdated and now seems to work against rural communities, not for them.

It is a system built on the best of intentions, but it has morphed into a labyrinth of bureaucracy.

A farmer told me last week that it feels as though the system of Natural England and the Environment Agency is there to trip you up, not help you.

Labour wants to make it even worse, because they are pushing through Parliament at this moment greater powers for Natural England.

They are giving them draconian compulsory purchase order powers to enable Natural England, an arm of the state, to seize private land from us and not pay market value for it.

You heard that right: they want an arm of the state to seize land from us.

Agricultural land and gardens are in the frame if Natural England judges it to be in accordance with their plans.

If that is not modern-day Marxism, I do not know what is.

This is what we are up against.

We must stop these powers.

When we are in government, we will review the regulations and regulators to ensure that we can get cracking, fixing the regulators and the regulations.

Some will say that to speak in these terms, to question the current system, is to be against nature, that to protect our rural communities and the environment is a binary choice, and the only answer is to maintain the status quo.

Such arguments ignore the reality of flooded communities, stifled rural economies, and villages desperate to attract young people and families.

They ignore the fact that the status quo is not working as we would wish for nature recovery either.

If we want to recover nature, we will need to reform our current approach.

We are going to work out a system that is fair to rural communities, fair to the environment, and works for us all, for the greater good of our countryside and coast.

This also means looking after rural and coastal economies.

I know from my beautiful constituency of Louth and Horncastle in Lincolnshire, and I am pleased we have some yellow bellies in the audience, that it is, I shall annoy other MPs by saying, clearly the best constituency in the country.

It is an incredibly rural constituency but also has wonderful miles of coastline.

I know, from my own constituency, from friends and neighbours there, that if local areas prosper, that is for the benefit of the whole of society.

What we are worried about in rural areas is the threat of stifling rural economies and a youth drain away from our countryside.

We do not want that.

You do not want that.

Part of the work we are going to do is to ensure that we bring the rural economy back to life.

I say this very conscious that I am standing in front of, perhaps, the shiniest tractor we have ever seen, a magnificent JCB tractor.

JCB is the epitome of a rural family business.

It was started in the market town of Uttoxeter.

It now employs 8,500 people in the UK alone and is an international brand, known all over the world and sold in 150 countries.

We are so lucky this year that they have driven their tractor into our conference because they are celebrating their 80th anniversary.

What an amazing achievement.

What a great rural business.

The rural economy accounts for some 3.8 million jobs and 500,000 businesses, and then, of course, even more in the coastal economy.

The Shadow Chancellor, as we heard this morning, is confronting some of the hard truths of the inheritance that we will have from this dreadful socialist government.

Mel and I, I promise you, will be working together in the coming months to draw up plans for a truly revitalised and exciting rural economy and coastal economy offer.

Please, feed in your ideas because we want you as our members to be a part of this.

We want to ensure that with all of this, our values are at the heart of what we do.

I am going to finish where I started, with the family farm and the family business tax.

The reason we were able to oppose this immediately is precisely because of our values.

We have that love of family, that belief in community and citizenship, that trust in personal freedom and responsibility.

We have fidelity to the rule of law.

We believe that we should be passing on a better country than that which we inherited, whilst respecting what has gone before.

We, as Conservatives, believe in the very conservation of Great Britain, and these values will inform our policies and the values of rural and coastal communities.

You might not think this matters, as I say, if you live in the city, but of course it matters because this is the fabric of our country.

We want to ensure that we are not only doing the hard work now in opposition to create the policies of the future but doing so with those values at the very core of everything we want to achieve for Great Britain in the future.

We, as Conservatives, will not let this socialist government destroy our countryside and our communities.

We, as Conservatives, believe in the countryside and rural Britain and coastal Britain.

Join us to axe the family farm tax, to fix the regulators, to save British farming, and to help make our countryside a stronger countryside for a stronger country.