David Fitzmaurice

Jeremy Clarkson has been refused permission to sell food he grew himself, twice. In the same window, central government overruled a Lincolnshire council to put solar panels across 1,214 hectares of grazing land, an area the size of Heathrow. Run the two columns side by side, because the pattern is the whole story. He asked to open a restaurant in his own lambing shed. Refused. He asked for a car park for the people already blocking the lane. Refused. He asked to sell food produced more than sixteen miles away. Capped at sixteen. He asked for a barn to store his own harvest, so he would not have to sell at whatever price August offered. Full application required. He asked about the restaurant again. Enforcement notice, and six weeks judged ample to put the building back as it was. Now the other column. Had he covered those same fields in solar panels, the council could have refused and been overruled from Whitehall, as Lincolnshire was in October 2025. Had he grown maize to feed an anaerobic digester, nobody would have written to anybody. Had he taken £532 a hectare from Defra to grow a legume fallow, he would have been paid to leave a crop standing that may not be harvested, grazed or sold. Defra cut that rate this year and gave the reason in writing: it had become attractive enough to take land out of food production. Had he sold the lot to a data centre, a battery park or a Chinese pig unit, all four of which he listed in his column last week, the paperwork would have moved considerably faster than a farm shop's. There is your planning system. Every use of English farmland is easier to permit than farming. Two hundred of his acres grew nothing at all this year, and the queue of people who want that ground for something other than food is already forming. He is not being stopped from developing the countryside. He is being stopped from feeding it.