Keynote speakers 4

Dr Natasha Grist,

Group Leader, Norwich Institute for Sustainable Development.

Natasha specialises in climate change, food systems, farming and international development, aiming to influence strategy and technical programmes that improve people’s farming practices and livelihoods across the world. She is fostering a coherent programme of research, policy engagement activity and capacity building, bringing together the wealth of science research at UEA, Tyndall Centre, the John Innes Centre and the wider Norwich Research Park, and their national and international partners.

Robbie Moore,

MP, Keighley and Ilkley.

We were delighted to welcome Nuffield Scholar, and MP for Keighley and Ilkley, Robbie Moore to the conference. Robbie’s lively presentation focused on encouraging Scholars to play a role in lobbying their local MPs, arming them with the issues they need to feed into Parliament debates.

Robbie emphasised the need for clear, concise messaging. He explained the issues MPs face in terms of lots of lobbyists and noise and that because agriculture crosses a number of different sectors and departments including international trade, health and business delivering your messages effectively is paramount. And with that in mind, he said the best people to deliver the messages are those that are in the business themselves; in this case farmers and Scholars.

Robbie gave them a ‘heads up’ that they were very lucky to have 2 hours’ of George Eustice’s and Lord Curry’s time when they visit Westminster when they would listen to their policy ideas. He again stressed the importance of making it worthy through clear messaging for the Government to listen and then take action.

To end his session, Robbie took questions from the floor about how best to build relationships with politicians, dealing with potential party policy conflict, overcoming natural or party bias and how, on his farm, he deals with plastic waste by recycling.