We asked you to submit your questions to candidates standing in the 2024 General Election.
From all your submissions, we chose 10 that represented the broad issues you wanted answers to.
We asked every candidate we had contact details for to respond.
We’ll be publishing them in the run-up to the General Election with the responses from the candidates who replied from each constituency.
These are the answers are from candidates standing in the Penrith & Solway constituency.
What will you do to stop run off from animal agriculture polluting lakes/rivers?
Mark Jenkinson, the Conservative Party
Quite simply, we won’t stop it. It happens naturally in non-agricultural settings.
But we can impact on run-off from the additional spreading of slurry/manure/artificial fertilisers through management, which the majority of our farmers do very well.
Much of our phosphate pollution is historic and difficult to shift, and we shouldn’t ‘visit the sins of the fathers onto the children’, no should we tar all with the same brush.
Farmers can also access schemes to cover the cost of trees, hedges and fences that can protect riverbanks from erosion.
Susan Denham-Smith, the Green Party
Stopping the run-off from animal agriculture polluting lakes and rivers is linked to creating a greener fairer food system and transitioning to greater food security, and a move away from factory farming.
An immediate action will be to increase DEFRA’s budget to be able to develop a soil health and monitoring programme for England to assess and understand changes in the health of soil over time.
This would end the flow of pollution into the rivers and the sea from fertilisers and agricultural waste and sewage through effective monitoring and enforcement.
