Estate Matters Episode 14: Victoria Vyvyan | The CLA President's views on land management under a Labour Government

CLA President and Cornish rural estate owner Victoria Vyvyan believes the new Labour Government and its Defra team are listening to voices from the countryside in essential areas of policy, including planning, farming and energy.

But she sounds a warning over aspects of the party’s ideology and warns if it is translated into punishing land taxes and an extension of compulsory purchase orders to boost housebuilding, it will be strongly opposed by the organisation she leads.

Victoria is nine months into a two-year presidency of the CLA, the land and business organisation with 26,000 members who are custodians of 11 million acres of England and Wales. She has already met with Defra Secretary Steve Reed and Farming Minister Daniel Zeichner since they took up their posts following the General Election.

She tells KOR Communications’ Estate Matters podcast that the strength of the CLA and its broad rural membership gives it a unique opportunity to influence the Government’s rural policy.  She tells podcast host Anna Byles: “We can go to Government and say, ‘these things that need doing, we can do them, but you need to work to ensure it works for our businesses.’”

She says farming and rural businesses operate on the principle of a three-legged stool made up of people, profit and planet – growing food, providing energy and space for homes and helping to restored depleted nature.

She says one of the biggest concerns of CLA members are potential changes to the tax relief when farms are passed between generations. She says it is the land that is the principal asset in many farm businesses. “If you tax land on death, for these multi-generational businesses that means you are going to have to sell land and those family land holdings…their capacity to be a proper business is diminished.”

She warns the Labour Government they could set out to make such changes, based on ideology, but will end up destroying family farms. She says of the CLA: “We’re really good people to be in on that conversation.”

On Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ promise to shake up the planning system in the quest for growth in the economy, Victoria says the CLA supports increasing the number of planning officers and would like to see more and better training for the profession that currently has an urban bias.

But she warns if the pressure to build more homes means landowners are forced to sell-up to developers at farmland prices – losing so-called ‘hope value’ - there will be opposition from the CLA. “You are asking farmers and the farming community to give up land effectively at agricultural prices so that somebody else can make lots of money out of it and I think that’s deeply unfair,” she says.

She admits that on her own estate, Trelowarren in West Cornwall that she runs with her husband, Sir Ferrers Vyvyan, it has sometimes been challenging to explain their work as a highly diversified rural business.

“Perhaps we should have spoken to KOR Communications about this,” she tells Anna. “We’ve never been able to explain what we do because it is a bit of a complicated picture and people like simple stories.”  But she says communication is important, to engage people on everything from solar energy to UK food security.

The Trelowarren Estate, on the south bank of the Helford Estuary, has a farm growing silage and brassicas, a forestry operation, 20 holiday lets, a restaurant and a café and is also developing a biodiversity net gain business, helping others to offset their carbon emissions.

She admits when the couple took on the Estate - which has been in the Vyvyan family since the 16th century and traces its history back to 1066 - there were doubts from some quarters it would be viable in the modern era. But she says they succeed through hard work and innovation – and that diversification and a regularly updated business model was essential.

Victoria, who worked as a teacher of English and history for many years, tells Anna: “We were young so, you know, we thought we could conquer the world; we were absolutely not afraid of hard work, and we wanted to recreate something of the original 1066 land holding we’ve got here. We’re not afraid of eating flint soup either – we’re not expensive people to keep!”

On her priorities for the future, she highlights the need for the devolved Government in Wales to learn from its earlier mistakes on agricultural policy and start working with the farming community.

She also says that “as a proud citizen of the People’s Republic of Cornwall” she wants to see the Government reach out to the regions and its minorities. She cited a CLA member in West Cornwall who asked at a recent meeting: “Why does nobody care about us – about our community?”

And on housing she called for the implementation of CLA policy to build a small number of homes in a large number of villages so that more young people are able to afford to buy a home of their own in, or near, the village where they grew up.

She urged Defra Secretary Steve Reed to take note adding, only half-jokingly: “Or perhaps I could just have his job!”