CLA focuses on letting you manage your land

Property rights and the ability to manage your land are fundamental to managing every rural business, the CLA’s new president Harry Cotterell tells Chris Lyddon

“The fundamental purpose of the CLA is the protection of property rights,” says Harry Cotterell, new president of the CLA.

“Property rights run to the heart of every farming or rural business.

It’s more than just ownership, taxation and the big-picture stuff. It’s right down to the ability to do your own thing, what you’re trying to do to run your business, to make your living on the land.”

This can mean things such as diversification, planning, relations with the parish council, even down to wayleaves, footpaths and public access, he explains.

“Some of our bigger members think of the CLA as their principal trade organisation,” Mr Cotterell says. “They derive their living predominantly from agriculture. They may not be farming themselves and may be renting it [their land] out. They may be farming part of it. There may be all sorts of arrangements. At the end of the day that is a property rights issue.

“CLA membership is a difficult sale to make because people say we’re not right in at the farming side in the same way the NFU is or the FUW,” Mr Cotterell says. “But we certainly are involved in the issues that relate to the rights pertaining to the property, things like the CAP, regulation, cross-compliance and all that kind of stuff, all of which relates to property rights.

“People may be slow to join the CLA but once they join they don’t half stay with us. We have very few lapsed members.

“What we’re doing is protecting the value of their asset. The emphasis must be more on the protection of the value of the asset, and the ability to do with it what you want.

“We’ll be trying to protect the balance sheet rather than the P & L (profit and loss),” Mr Cotterell explains. “Obviously the P & L is important because it impacts on the balance sheet in the long-term.”

Political lobbying is the key to the CLA’s activities, and that is not just at national government level. “We lobby on every scale and at every level, from Europe where we do it in conjunction with our sister organisation the European Landowners Organisation (ELS), right down to the local district councils in two-tiered authorities.

“If you don’t understand the lobbying, you don’t understand the CLA.”
Mr Cotterell prefers lobbying to be proactive. “We recently produced papers on planning and water, both of which are crucial to diversification for farmers and improving their own farm businesses,” he says. “We’ve done a lot of work on trying to make sense of regulation and draw the attention of the regulators and politicians to the huge importance of water to the agricultural industry.”

The CLA is also planning to bring out an equine policy. “A lot of agricultural businesses have got a little equine sideline,” Mr Cotterell points out. “That’s coming out probably in the New Year. Before that we’ve got a forestry and woodlands paper.

“When we’re proactive we’re at our best. You start with a blank piece of paper. You put it out there for other people to react to, and hopefully influence the way they form their opinions.”
It is a fact of life, however, that most of the CLA’s lobbying is defensive. “You hear of something coming up from a government initiative either at the pre-consultation stage or as a consultation and we react to it,” he says. “More often than not, very sadly, these consultations are going to impact negatively on our members, their property rights and their ability to run their businesses. The best we can hope for is what you could call the least worst outcome.”

Most of the reactive lobbying is trying to stave off additional levels of bureaucracy or restrictions on what property owners can do with their land.

“We live in a property owning democracy,” says Mr Cotterell. “There’s an instinctive move away from state ownership of anything.”

He is a firm believer that the private sector is the best way of operating land. “You only have to look around you. What nation has nationalised land and produced a vibrant and effective economic outcome? They don’t.

“The role of the state is to regulate. We would obviously like it to regulate less, and to try to stimulate the requirements of a successful economy. That includes the rural economy.

“It’s great to see this Government, for example, looking at reduction of regulation. The Regulatory Task Force, we wait to see how that will pan out. The vast majority of the recommendations were music to our ears.”