The Conservative Party is haemorrhaging support in rural areas, and it must develop policies that appeal to farmers and countryside dwellers if it wants to arrest the decline, a leading pollster has suggested.
Patrick English, associate director at YouGov, said support for the Conservatives among rural communities has reversed with the Labour Party since the summer.
Speaking at an NFU Conservative Party fringe event in Birmingham on Monday 3 October, Mr English revealed the latest YouGov poll of people living in rural areas showed 28% of support for the Conservatives, with Labour on 41%.
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This compares with voting intentions of about 43% for the Conservatives and 24% for Labour in August.
“These are the communities that we would traditionally say, hands down, vote Conservative, have Conservative values, who the party traditionally appeals to,” said Mr English.
“They are now pretty much reversed from the summer. The Conservatives are more than 15 points behind.”
National decline mirrored
Mr English said the scale of the national decline in support for the Conservatives was being played out in local areas, including in rural communities.
“The Conservative Party needs to look at the different challenges it faces in these rural communities and come up with solutions to deal with those issues,” he added.
Mr English said there are some “easy policy wins” for the Conservatives – for example, giving more support to British farmers in trade deals and allowing more visas for sectors that need immigrant workers.
The British public wants to see British farmers and their interests and assets protected, Mr English said.
“A lot of that is because they view farming as being able to have local produce and get the best of British as a fundamental part of their own health and benefit, and as part of fighting climate change,” he added.
“They would much rather see local produce come through, eat locally, eat sustainably and be able to have that infrastructure around them than to have this situation where local farmers are getting undercut.
“These policies that will protect farmers, promote sustainability and local produce hold very, very well.”
Uncertainty is ‘biggest worry’
Responding to the figures, Sir Robert Goodwill, Conservative MP for Scarborough and Whitby and a former Defra farm minister, said the majority of people who live in the countryside were not farmers.
Sir Robert acknowledged there were many concerns people living in rural communities shared with farmers, such as the cost of fuel – both for vehicles and heating homes – housing affordability and people buying second homes (with Conservative-held councils looking at doubling council tax to deter them).
For agriculture, Sir Robert said the biggest worry was uncertainty – with nobody really knowing what the future holds.
Efra committee embarks on joint reports on food security and ELM scheme
The Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Efra) select committee is embarking on two significant reports related to farming policy this autumn.
Sir Robert Goodwill, chairman of the influential cross-party group of MPs, said the first is on food security, rewilding and use of land for solar; the second on the implementation of the Environmental Land Management (ELM) scheme.
The Efra committee would look at whether to recommend to government some form of residual element, like they have in Scotland, of the Basic Payment Scheme for smaller farms in England, which Sir Robert acknowledged is “controversial”.
“Some farms might find it difficult to do some of these things for the environment, because they might be already doing it,” he added.
“I’m just floating the idea to have some sort of residual payment, maybe £10,000, or something like that, so every small unit can continue to get support. So, we are looking forward to taking that evidence [to government].”
