THE visit of the new Prime Minister Andy Burnham to Cornwall last week was welcome.

For security reasons, even local MPs including me didn’t find out about his visit until the afternoon before. Several of us had put in a request for a visit and we had heard rumours, but it fell to my colleague Jayne Kirkham to host him on a farm near Truro.

Sadly, protocol is that only the local MP is invited to join the entourage that includes his security team, staff, media and at Jayne’s request, the leader of Cornwall Council, Leigh Frost.

This was a good call as we want to demonstrate to the Prime Minister both cross-party collaboration but also the collaboration between government MPs and Cornwall Council. This had the desired effect as, when discussing devolution, the Prime Minister referred to that consensus of opinion.

He came to Cornwall to raise awareness of the dire situation faced by our farmers of the double whammy of rising fuel and fertiliser prices, as a result of the Iran war, and the cripplingly hot weather to which the UK has been subjected and its devastating effect on crop yields.

The Prime Minister demonstrated how potatoes harvested today are a fraction of the size that they should be due to this year’s drought. Flanked by National Farmers Union (NFU) President, Tom Bradsham, the Prime Minister announced a £65-million funding boost to support farmers affected by the drought. The package includes: £15-million for building farm reservoirs to store water and become more resilient to future droughts; £50-million for the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) scheme, increasing the SFI budget to £290-million; temporary adjustments to the Environmental Land Management scheme (ELMs) to allow farmers to continue to receive payments and take practical steps to protect livestock, crops and land; and action to make it easier to build reservoirs and reduce unnecessary bureaucratic barriers; and improved access to water during drought conditions, with the Environment Agency (EA) prioritising requests for short-term variations to abstraction license conditions.

The inevitable question of devolution also came up with the Prime Minister.

Now, I have written several times about Cornish devolution in these pages and my view has remained absolutely consistent since before I was even elected and I am very glad that colleagues in Westminster and without are coming round to my view: no mayoral combined authority with Devon or anyone else to the east of the Tamar; no mayor for Cornwall; and a package of powers and funding that recognises Cornwall’s unique location, national minority status and heritage.

We know the potential for Cornwall to be an economic powerhouse, based on our natural resources. We know the challenges we face – be they housing, skills, transport or economic development.

And whilst I was pleased to hear the Prime Minister’s invitation to discuss Cornish devolution at ‘No 10 North’ in Manchester, my attendance is conditional on the understanding that all of these issues will be on the table for discussion, and not just some of them.