Where are all the £100k houses George?

BY and large I regard people who have been born and brought up in rural areas as being endowed with a generous measure of common sense.

But there are always exceptions to any rule, the one I have in mind being that horny-handed son of the Cornish soil, George Eustice.

George has been the MP for Camborne and Redruth for 12 years so he is well-acquainted with one of the most contentious of all issues facing the county of his birth: the continual reduction of the available housing stock thanks to the unrelenting demand for second homes.

It is a matter which has been raised with all of Cornwall’s MPs for many years without, apparently, achieving any measurable effect or resulting in even a partial cooling of the market.

In fact the ‘right’ that outsiders appear to have to buy a second home in Cornwall appears more entrenched than ever. One new owner was recently interviewed on TV and asked if he didn’t consider that he was damaging the local economy by only appearing for a couple of weeks in the summer and perhaps at Christmas. His reply was that as a British taxpayer he was perfectly at liberty to own a second, third or fourth home as he so wished.

In the face of such attitudes it is difficult to see what is going to stem the tide other than legislation to limit the ownership of houses in Cornwall to genuine Cornish people henceforward.

Difficult to imagine any government going to such lengths and in any case the damage has been done: the demand for second homes has pushed property prices well beyond the reach of people living in what remains a predominantly low-wage area. As is precisely the case across large swathes of the South West.

Which brings me round to George’s latest bright idea for looking after tenant farmers such as me. In order to enable us to leave the industry before we work ourselves into the ground – and perhaps, even a little earlier than the standard retirement age if we have had enough – he’s offering a golden handshake of £100,000.

The thinking behind this gesture is that not only will it assist ageing farmers to transit seamlessly into quiet retirement, it will clear the decks for a younger generation of fired-up, dynamic young farmers to come in and revitalise the entire sector.

Now all I need is for George to tell me where the £100,000 houses are, because the last time I checked they were in spectacularly short supply. Particularly in this part of the country.

Even more relevantly, all those opportunities George dreams of for getting young farmers into the business are steadily vanishing too. All he has to do is to read the same report as I recently did which reveals in the north of the country 40 per cent of farmland is now being eagerly snapped up for non-farming purposes such as capital investment or carbon offsetting.

What this illustrates is that George and his dismal little department are again behind the game, woefully out of touch with reality and living in some farming fairyland.

Mainly because Defra spends so much time framing its policies (look how long it took to cook up even a skeleton version of our post-Brexit agricultural framework) that by the time they are debated, refined, reviewed, fine-tuned, polished and published, the world has already moved on.

If George – as was always the case with agriculture ministers in the past – took regular soundings around the country at face-to-face, informal meetings with genuine, grassroots farmers, he might have a chance of staying in touch.

As it is, while his latest proposals may play well with the public – and will even lead to more than a few accusations of farmers being featherbedded at taxpayers’ expense – it is yet another example of Defra announcing a policy which was actually obsolete as soon as the ink was dry.