HC Deb 17 December 1943 vol 395 cc1922-30
Mr. Clement Davies (Montgomery)

I want to raise a matter which is of immediate and urgent importance to members of the farming community who are tenant farmers and as it also concerns food production is a matter in which the whole community is indirectly concerned and directly affected. I regret that I have to raise the matter at this very late hour and in such a thin House when so many of my colleagues who represent agricultural constituencies are not present. I raised the matter in a Question to the Minister last week, and it is because of the Minister's reply that I am taking this the first opportunity of bringing the matter to the attention of the House. It concerns the part of the country with which I am very familiar and which I also represent.

In North Montgomeryshire there was a small estate which was owned by Mr. Sandbach. He owned and occupied a large house called Bryngwyn Hall with a certain amount of parkland attached, and he owned also a certain number of farms, about half a dozen or so. He died some 15 or 20 years ago, and the estate then passed to his widow. She did not occupy this large house, and it has been empty ever since. She occupied a smaller house, almost a cottage, in a village which is near. She died in August, 1942, and apparently under her will the estate has now passed to her daughter. The daughter in the meantime had got married, and she lives something like 80 or 90 miles away from this district. This lady having taken possession as executrix in August, 1942, there arrived in March of this year at two farms which were owned by her an agent who said that he had refused to draw the document he was about to hand over to the farmers, that it had been drawn by a solicitor, and that he had refused to post it because he thought in fairness to the two farmers he should come all that way to tell them what had happened. The document was a notice to quit their farms, and they will have to do so unless the Minister can intervene this coming March. The agent said he had refused to post these notices to quit or draw up the document because he had never been asked to do such a thing before, that he deeply regretted his position, and he thought the least he could do was to come all that way and explain. There was no letter from the landlady then, but one arrived some 10 days later, stating that she and her husband wished to take over the two farms and farm them themselves.

That is the position of these two farmers. One of the farms, Stone house Farm, is occupied by a Mr. Edwards, who was born on that farm some 67 years ago. His father and mother married about a year or so before. They went to that farm as tenants, I think in the year 1875, and the present tenant was born in 1876, so the family have been there for 68 years. The present farmer got married and has four children, three sons and a daughter, who all assist in the farm operations. The size of the farm is 217 acres and the rent £327. Some 40 years ago there was added to the farm another holding where, as so often happens in Wales, the house had become derelict, and so the land was added to the adjacent farm. The size of that one was 130 acres, so, all told, he farms some 347 acres, the rental of the whole being £556 10s. The notice to quit was given, of course, in respect of the farm of 217 acres, which he holds from this lady, whose name is now Mrs. MacPherson Mackerson Sandbach. The other farm is a smallholding of 39 acres, farmed by a man named Arthur Williams. He succeeded his father, who died some two years ago, but, as so often occurs in these cases, he had been joint tenant with his father since 1937. Again, it is a family farm. He lives there with an invalid sister who is over 50 and another sister who is somewhere between 45 and 50. The rental is £2 an acre, totalling £78.

Although I am familiar with those two farms, and, indeed, every farm in Montgomeryshire, I paid a visit last Wednesday to those two farms, in order to be quite sure of my facts. I spent a considerable time with the farmers and saw the farms and the stock. They have had a reputation for a very considerable time of being among the best farmers in North Montgomeryshire and of having some of the best farmed land in that county. Their food production is excellent. May I give the production figures of the larger farm? There, the farmer has been farming a mixed farm, in the main of dairy cattle, and his herd has never been less that 20 milking cows. They are all tuberculin-tested, and he produces, on the agerage, some 10,000 gallons of T.T. milk a year. He rears between 30 and 40 heifer calves every year, fattens his young stock and sends them to the nearest market, which, prior to the war, was a very excellent market in Oswestry, one of the finest in the country He sends between 40 and 50 of his fattened steers to the market, obtaining the top price; he has some 230 ewes, producing 350 lambs, and he fattens another 50, and he has 80 to go pigs. He has also 12 or 14 horses. Since the war, he has been ploughing some 97 acres, 21 of wheat and the remainder of barley, oats, mixed corn, potatoes and so on. His bill, for purchases of feeding stuffs prior to the war was never less than £1,000 a year, all that adding to the benefit of the soil and of improved farming. The other farm smallholding has, in a sense, been even better. The annual bill of this farmer is now somewhere between £200 and £300, on this little farm of 39 acres. There, again, he rears young cattle and fattens his steers. He had been doing that very excellent work of buying heifer calves, keeping them until they are about three years old and selling them and their calves, and every year he has been able to pass through his hands some 20 of them. He has also been feeding as many as 20 steers. He also has some 20 sheep and sends his fat lambs to the market.

Those are the facts with regard to the two farms, which have a high reputation as being excellent farms. Now, this young lady, who, as far as we can ascertain, has had no experience whatsoever of farming, has come along. I do not know what experience her husband has had. I understand that he is about 30 years of age and I have been told that he was in the Army prior to the war and has been invalided out. Anyway, they have their home some 80 miles away at Abergele. There they live, and could continue to live, until after the war; but because they have now become the owners of the farms, by the death of the lady's mother in August, 1942, suddenly these two families, who are indigenous to the soil and who know no other home than this—one of these families has been on the farm for 100 years—are to be turned out. They have nowhere to go. If they had been cottagers, they would have been protected. The only mode of life they know is farming, and farming has been not only their sole means of earning a livelihood but their only mode of life. The man who is now 67 has worked hard all the days of his life. He is not very strong and he is dependent to a very large extent upon his young family who, again, know no other home or work than this.

What is the power of the Minister? The matter was raised in this House in November, 1941, I think, and the particular instance which brought the matter to the attention of the Minister was again that of a Welshman. A landowner had given notice to quit to his tenants with a view to the selling of the estate, and there was a danger that land speculators would come along, purchase this land and hold up the farmers to ransom. The Minister thereupon intervened and took special powers. Those special powers are limited to the case where a farm has been subject to a contract of sale since the date of the outbreak of the war. Where there has been a contract of sale, no notice to quit is valid unless the Minister assents thereto in writing. There has been no contract of sale here. This young woman succeeded her mother, and therefore she is outside that particular Order. Therefore, we have to rely upon the Defence Regulations and under those Regulation the Minister can intervene if he is satisfied that food production will deteriorate as a result of the farmers being turned out. Apparently, the Minister very rightly referred this matter to the local war agricultural executive committee. In his reply to me the other day he said: At my request the county war agricultural executive committee have considered the circumstances of these two cases very carefully and have advised me that they can find no grounds on which they would be justified in seeking my consent to their taking possession of the farms in order to retain the sitting tenants in occupation. It is understood that the object of the landlords in giving the notice to quit is to farm the lands themselves and there is no reason to an anticipate that the lands under their control will be less productive than under that of the sitting tenant."—[OFFICIAL. REPORT, 9th December, 1943; col. 1132, Vol. 395.] On that I join issue. Here we have two people, husband and wife, who are not of the farming community. They do not come of farming stock, and as far as I know, have never done a stroke of work upon the land.

The farmers who are being turned out have worked on that land ever since they could walk, and know every field of it and, one might say, every blade of grass on it. They are indigenous to the soil. They know the capacity of every field, and being good farmers they have planned ahead. Every good farmer does that. You cannot plan from year to year. They have a long-term policy. Anybody coming in fresh must break into the continuity of that policy. These farmers know the capacities of the fields. They know what they have produced in the past and they know what they intended to do probably for the next three, four or five years. A breach of continuity must result in one of two things. The new man coming in can reap an immediate advantage to himself, to the disadvantage of the land. That we have often witnessed. A good farmer having planned ahead, desiring to keep his land in good heart, would not drive that land to its uttermost limit. But a new man coming in will reap a quick crop on it, benefit himself for a short while and leave the land. That is one result. The alternative is that he will not be able to get as much out of that land as the outgoing occupier could have got, because he will not know the capacity of that land and of course at the present time the country will be the sufferer. The break in continuity must affect the quantity of food produced. That is the really important question which the Minister has to put to himself.

There is another matter incidental to that. I take it that these two farmers, unless the Minister intervenes, will have to arrange for the selling of their stock, all their farming stock, live and dead, all their implements and possibly their furniture because we have no empty houses now, except this vast mansion which is still empty. There is a great shortage of agricultural implements. When there is an agricultural sale in the community the prices for these second-hand or third-hand or fourth-hand implements jump up enormously. Farmers are crying out for new implements. This landlord will be coming in. Where is she to get the implements, which she has not at the moment, as far as I know? Is it to be suggested that she will have priority for new implements in order to get the same food production as these two farmers? Where are the implements to come from? Will those people bid at this sale? If so I do not envy them appearing at the sate. These two notices to quit have stirred the whole community. It is the talk of every market. The farmers talk is of this kind: "If we farm badly we are told we can be turned out, and rightly turned out. If we farm well, and do our best, we have no guarantee we shall be allowed to remain."

I said at the outset that it is not merely a case of these two farmers in this particular instance but that this is affecting the morale of the farming community. It might interest the House to know that, although a great number of farms came into the market at the end of the last war, when landowners were taking advantage of the rising prices and selling their farms, the tenants, rather than go out, were paying inflated prices and although a great number came in then, even to-day 85 per cent. of the holdings in Wales are holdings by tenants under individual landlords. Now what is their position if this is an example of what might occur to them? I want to make an appeal to the Minister. He is relying upon the advice that has been given to him by this war agricultural committee. What evidence they take, what considerations move them, I do not know, but I do beg of him to reconsider this matter, and if he is not prepared to take action on his own, would he do this? Would he have an independent inquiry asking the one question he is entitled to ask. If these two farmers, these two families, are disturbed and thrown out in this way, will food production deteriorate? There should be a proper inquiry into the whole matter and then my farmers would be satisfied. If, perchance, that independent inquiry said, "We are of the opinion—" or "I am of the opinion that this will affect the food production," then I hope the Minister will intervene. If he came to the conclusion, that inquiry having gone into the matter fully and heard all the evidence on both sides, that food production would not be interfered with, then the Minister not only would not but could not interfere. This is a matter so vital that I appeal to the Minister and through the Minister to the House for their support and sympathy in these two very distressing cases.

The Minister of Agriculture (Mr. R. S. Hudson)

I think my hon. and learned Friend has stated very correctly the legal position, which is that my primary concern is food production, and the only reason I should have for intervening would be if there were any reasonable doubt whether food production would be maintained or any reasonable presumption that food production would suffer. After all, this is an ordinary tenancy under the Agricultural Holdings Act under which, on the one hand, the tenant has the right to give 12 months notice to his landlord if he is not satisfied, and on the other hand, the landlord has the right to give 12 months notice to his tenant. The only difference is that if the landlord gives notice to his tenant, he has to pay the tenant compensation for disturbance, unless it can be shown that the tenant has failed to carry out some important clause of his agreement, or unless, pre-war, he could get a certificate to say that the tenant was guilty of bad husbandry. It does not come under the special Order issued in 1941 with the deliberate intention of meeting the desire widely expressed in this House, to do something to stop land speculation. I think that particular Order was successful.

Therefore we have the narrow point: Is this notice to quit likely to result in any material impairment of the food production campaign? On that, I naturally have to take local advice. I am satisfied that the matter has been exhaustively and impartially examined. I do not think that my hon. and learned Friend was, perhaps, quite fair to the owner. The owner herself is farming in, I believe, one of the North Welsh counties and our information is that she is farming well. Not only is she farming well, but she has greatly improved the condition of the farm since she took it over. It is, therefore, I think, not altogether fair to say that she knows nothing about farming.

Her husband is what I suppose you would call technically a disabled ex-Service man. He was in the Army, and he retired. He went into farming, and did extremely well; therefore, contrary to what my hon. and learned Friend has led hon. Members to believe, he is a knowledgeable fanner. I understand that he then rejoined the Army, and that he has now been invalided out. I would say that, so far as one can judge, the local committee had every ground for assuming that there would be no reduction in food production. Indeed, since the departing tenant is 67—although he has been a good farmer, and there is no dispute that he is still a good farmer to-day—I think there is no reason to doubt that the new people will do much better. As for Mr. Edwards—

Mr. Davies

Is not the name Williams?

Mr. Hudson

I understand that it is Edwards. Even supposing that I had been advised by the local committee that I ought to intervene, and even supposing that I had agreed, it would have done no good, because I understand that this gentleman has stated that even if the notice were withdrawn by the owner, he would not stay on.

Mr. Davies

That is not so.

Mr. Hudson

That is his statement.

Mr. Davies

I saw him the other day—

Mr. Hudson

He said, in confidence, that the friendship between landlord and tenant had been disturbed by this action, and that he would not stay on. But I have no power to intervene, unless there is reasonable ground to suppose that there would be a reduction in food production. Obviously, I have to exercise that power only after very careful consideration.

I have done it in a very few cases, where I am satisfied that there would be a drop in production if I did not. I am not satisfied of that in this case, and, therefore, I am afraid that I would not be justified in exercising my powers.