Is Steve Reed, an MP for an urban constituency, really the right man to head up Defra? - Jayne Dowle

No disrespect to Mr Reed, 60, who was born in St Albans, Hertfordshire – his family worked in a printing factory, until it closed down – and studied English at the University of Sheffield. He was employed in educational publishing before moving into politics, serving as leader of Lambeth Council and in many significant local government roles in London and nationally.

There is no doubt that he knows how politics works and he held the Shadow Environment brief for a year in Opposition, but Reed’s appointment is somewhat puzzling. Or perhaps not that much of a surprise.

His brief is wide – top of his to-do list will be untangling the mess the water industry is in – and his negotiating skills will be very much to the fore. And there is precedent. Michael Gove, very much urbane, was praised by the editor of Farmers Weekly, Andrew Meredith, for deftly capitalising on rising public interest in environmental affairs on his arrival in the department, one that is often seen as a political backwater.

There is, however, concern that when it comes to the countryside, Reed is, literally, not best-placed to understand.

I was speaking to an arable farmer the other day and he was incredulous that Labour had not seized the initiative to represent rural areas in Cabinet. “Once again the farmers have been forgotten,” he said.

This is especially pertinent after the unhappy hotchpotch of Conservative incumbents at Defra.

In total, there were 10 Secretaries of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs since the 2010 General Election, including Gove (June 2017 to July 2019) and Therese Coffey (October 2022 to November 2023), one of four Tory former Defra Secretaries who lost their seats on July 4.

Even Liz Truss had a go for a couple of years, between 2014 and 2016, and we all know what happened to her in South Norfolk.

Despite many now-fallen Tories representing rural constituencies and having links to the land – or owning large chunks of it – tumultuous years in government, including the saga of Brexit, and tortuous arguments over EU subsidies and tariffs, have caused a series of massive rifts between countryside dwellers and Westminster.

So, in all, not a lot of love lost for the Conservative brigade. Labour, however, seems to be failing to capitalise on this disenchantment.

As the Countryside Alliance pointed out last month, the Labour manifesto did not mention the word ‘rural’ once.

Yet it did mention ‘housing’, promising 1.5m new homes during this parliament and committing to a series of new towns. Despite the Prime Minister’s reassuring words about utilising the ‘grey belt’, areas of disused land such as empty lots and former car parks, only a fool would believe that these ambitious plans are not going to encroach upon the countryside.

The fear from farmers and others in rural areas is that too often, politicians regard the country as a series of towns and cities with nothing much in between except a sea of green.

As the Countryside Alliance points out: “Cities and towns receive multiple mentions [in the Labour manifesto] but at no point does the document acknowledge the specific challenges rural areas face within broader areas of policy, such as transport and public services.

Not until someone wants to build something (houses, roads, prisons, detention centres), or erect something (wind turbines), or dig something (coal mines in Cumbria), does ‘the countryside’ come into sharp focus.

Yet we live on an island that is at once over-crowded and also undeveloped. According to official government figures, only 10.5 per cent of land in England is classified as ‘built-up’.

It’s ironic, isn’t it, that the other 89.5 per cent seems to be ignored by Downing Street quite a lot of the time. Local government, typically underfunded and lacking in resources, is left to fight most of the battles in rural areas alone, whether it’s over planning, fly tipping, poor public transport or organised crime.

Many of those in central government forget, the accusation goes, that the land is what we all live on; we should not take it for granted.