Yesterday, in his first Prime Minister’s Questions, Andy Burnham took aim at the shadow chancellor over his role backing Liz Truss’s mini-budget, saying he was “hardly some PPS to the Defra Secretary.” He has since laughed it off, and posted good-naturedly that he loves DEFRA’s PPSs really. Nobody should read this as some deliberate slight on rural affairs, and I don’t intend to make it one.
But it was, whether intended or not, a small and telling moment. The joke only lands if everyone in the room already accepts the premise: that a junior role at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is shorthand for political irrelevance. That is not about Andy Burnham. It is about how Westminster as a whole has come to see what I firmly believe is one of the most important departments in government.
I say this as someone who has argued, including on this very platform, that Labour needs to take rural and coastal Britain far more seriously if it wants to rebuild trust in the places that feel forgotten. But that cannot be done if the department responsible for food, farming, water, flooding and the natural environment is seen by Westminster as a stepping stone or a punishment posting.
Consider what Defra is actually responsible for. It oversees the food security of nearly 70 million people. It regulates the water industry at a moment when public trust in water companies has collapsed and rivers are in a visibly poor state. It leads on flood defences for communities that, as I wrote last time, are already living with the consequences of climate change. It manages our fisheries, our forests, our national parks, and our obligations on biodiversity and climate adaptation. This is not a niche brief. It sits close to the heart of what it means to keep a country fed, safe and resilient.
And yet, since 2010, the job of Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has been held by 13 different people. It has changed hands more often than almost any other Cabinet post, under governments of both colours. Shadow Defra briefs have moved just as often: Labour had 9 different people in 14 years and the Conservatives have had 2 in 2 years. The role has arguably been treated by successive opposition leaders as a place to park talent between more “serious” jobs rather than a portfolio worth mastering. Institutional memory is lost every time. Farmers, water companies and environmental groups are left negotiating with a minister who may be gone within the year, while the underlying problems, from soil health to flood resilience to food supply chains, take a decade or more to fix.
This has consequences beyond Westminster gossip. It is hard to build a long-term food security strategy when the people responsible for it rotate every twelve to eighteen months. It is hard to hold water companies to account when every new ministerial appointment forces Parliament and regulators to start the conversation again. It is hard to convince farmers that government sees them as a strategic national industry, rather than a line item to be managed at Budget time, when the department speaking for them carries less weight in Whitehall’s pecking order.
None of this is a partisan point. The last Conservative government treated Defra as a revolving door. This Labour government cannot afford to repeat that mistake, whoever occupies Downing Street. Dame Angela Eagle has inherited a department facing some of the hardest tests in domestic politics: keeping food bills down without weakening producers, cleaning up rivers, lakes and seas while holding water companies to account, backing farmers as the backbone of food security, restoring nature as part of national resilience, and using renewed EU relations to ease the friction that still holds back supply chains. That is not a holding brief. It is a delivery brief of the first order, and it requires stability, status and a seat close to the centre of government thinking.
There is a simple test for how seriously a government takes an issue: does it put people there to stay, or does it put people there to wait for something better? For too long, across too many governments, Defra has failed that test. Food security is national security. Water security is national security. A stable natural environment is the foundation everything else is built on. It’s time we started treating the department in charge of all of it that way, in substance as well as in name.
That makes the treatment of Angela Eagle more than an internal Whitehall question. Giving her the time to stay in the role, and the backing, authority and machinery she needs to deliver, will be one of the clearest tests of whether this government is serious about the change it says it wants, not just in speeches, but in the way power is organised, priorities are protected, and departments are allowed to get on with the hard, unglamorous work of delivery.
Defra doesn’t need Downing Street’s sympathy. It needs Downing Street to take it seriously.
As I set out previously, I genuinely believe Andy Burnham understands the scale of that challenge. His instinct to push power out of Westminster is exactly the sort of politics these issues demand. But rural and coastal Britain has heard warm words before. The test now is whether Defra is given the weight, the time and the backing to do the job properly.
Josh Kaile is a former Labour political adviser for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.
