Why ‘grow for Britain’ plans may prove fallow
SIR – You report (June 11) that Boris Johnson wants planning rules to be “relaxed to make it easier to convert land into farms”.
Meanwhile, greenfield sites and good-quality land are being lost to large-scale residential development. We overlook houses built on a field that was previously classed as Grade 1 (meaning “best and most versatile”) farmland. Now it is lost forever.
Ron Elliston
Hatfield Peverel, Essex
SIR – What a brilliant idea, so clever that I am astonished no one in Westminster has thought of it before: get farmers to grow food. Graham Bond
Matching Green, Essex
SIR – The PM’S idea of “growing for Britain” is laudable, but will fail.
Some crops already rot in the ground and on trees because we cannot get enough people to harvest them, and technology isn’t yet capable of the task.
We must remember the summer of 2020, when Britons were encouraged to help “bring in the harvest” and fewer than five per cent stayed the course. The work is hard and the days are long.
John Landamore
Lutterworth, Leicestershire
SIR – Recently my sister-in-law went to a large asparagus farm. The accommodation that formerly housed the workers (from the EU) was empty, and the farmer had lost 80 per cent of his crop for lack of pickers. Draw your own conclusions.
Boris Johnson seems more interested in generating headlines to save his own skin than solving a problem that he has helped to create. Alan Scovell
Woodbridge, Suffolk