This is a transcript of a video recorded by TFA Chief Executive, George Dunn on 12 June 2024.  It explains the four key areas that the Tenant Farmers Association (TFA) will be asking the newly elected Westminster government to take forward.

We are in the middle of the UKs General Election buildup and in just a few short weeks, newly elected MP’s will be finding their way onto those famous green benches in the House of Commons.

This week, we have seen the launch of the political parties manifestos and I just thought it would be worthwhile just for highlight the four key areas that the Tenant Farmers Association (TFA) will be asking the newly elected government to take forward.

The first is to drive forward the recommendations from the Rock Review into agricultural tenancies, carried out by Baroness Kate Rock in October 2022. It’s a ready-made agenda for the government, it doesn’t need to do anything in terms of policy development. It is there for them to pick up, and we want them to pick up the policy, the legislative and the taxation proposals within that report, including the appointment of the Tenant Farming Commissioner, which was announced shortly before the general election was announced.

Secondly, the TFA wants to see fairness within the supply chains. Growers and farmers have been treated pretty ruthlessly by retail supply chains. This means that the returns that they get for their labour and their investment are shockingly lower comparison to the returns to retailers. So we want to see a larger degree of emphasis on driving fairness of the supply chains through the expanded role for Groceries Code Adjudicator.

Thirdly, we are looking to the government to really ramp up the use of our post Brexit freedoms in terms of trade liberalisation and deregulation to drive resilience within the sector. We’ve done very little of that since our decision to leave the European Union just a few years ago.

Finally, they want to see the government having a better balance between food, environmental and energy security. At the moment we’re seeing too much land lost to vanity projects like rewilding, too many tenanted acres being used for solar energy production. We want to see food security higher up the agenda. But within a balance between environmental and energy security too. So the TFA will be out and about lobbying candidates, and we will be here back in Westminster once those MP’s get down for business and the government gets appointed.

So if you’re not yet a member of the TFA, why don’t you consider joining us and with your support we will continue our work to drive forward the agenda of the tenanted sector of agriculture.