As a member of the Planning Team of the Chiltern Society, I recently attended a society meeting where we were given a briefing by some local farmers about the serious problems farmers have in living with the CAP regulations, which seem to specifically single out the British farmer for unfair treatment. Nearly half the EU budget is spent on the CAP. The main speaker – a farmer – pointed out, as just one instance, that under CAP rules farmers in England are 'permitted' to produce only about 80% as much milk as we consume whereas France, Germany and Ireland can produce more milk than they need. Result? Supermarkets are buying the European surplus cheaply and offer English farmer a knock-down price for their milk. In consequence, dairy farming in this country is in serious decline. I have heard that in many cases a farmer's income has dropped by 90% over the past decade. I’m not sure how much farming is done in Taplow but I suspect that this rings a bell somewhere in the parish.
The farmers are encouraged by the government to diversify in order to help them pay their bills but a strange anomaly then emerges: the Planning Officers are refusing to give them planning permission to so do! The apparent reasons for this are not surprising to us veterans of HTPS. Planners tend not to know very much about farming issues and they apply urban-dominated thinking to rural problems. In the case of the meeting I attended, the Chiltern Society were approached by a group of Wycombe farmers for help in getting their applications for diversification considered in a more knowledgeable way by the Wycombe planners. It seems it is extremely difficult to get to talk to any planner in that district about their special needs. The emerging South East Plan is seriously out of touch with countryside issues and contains hardly any reference to farming. The trouble is that diversification requires a change of use of farming land, which usually means a permanent loss to farming and is almost always in Green Belt areas. It’s a real problem because neither we, the HTPS, nor the Chiltern Society want to see permission granted to use GB land for development yet, thanks to the CAP, we are losing farmland at an appalling rate as farmers finally give up the struggle to try to earn a decent living. Diversification by definition takes the farmer's eye off the primary business of farming and most farmers would tell you they would far rather farm their land than run a bed and breakfast business.
Fred Russell
