Jeremy's Blog 18th November 2022: What Best Delivers Environmental Objectives

This article by Jeremy Moody first appeared in the CAAV e-Briefing of 17th November 2022

There is a dreary and repetitive pattern to some public discussion of environmental schemes, one that appears to fail to understand, ignore or hide the realities of policies but seems to make good copy. Too often, it defaults to see not only backsliding but betrayal, alleging that at each turn the Government is about to hold a bonfire of the environment. Looking back, lobby groups were raising this concern at the time of the CAAV’s National Conference in June. They went full throttle in late September on the back of the “rapid review” as new ministers undertook a natural stocktaking of the delivery of DEFRA policy.

As that review now comes towards a conclusion, yesterday’s press again reported agitated reactions from some groups that potential changes to present delivery plans would waste the effort to date, if not be DEFRA abandoning its objectives.

This is all curious, mis-reading the picture and risking the confusion that would undermine the new schemes more than aiding sensible policy development, particularly where it breaches the confidentiality requested to help that. Almost all criticise the legacy policies inherited from the EU as needing reform but some can default to denouncing actual proposals for change as regressive. It is rational to review the delivery of policy for it to be effective – especially with today’s Financial Statement. That is particularly so now we are two years into the seven year Agricultural Transition Plan with new ministers and just as significant sums of money are to become available from Basic Payment to fund change.

Government policy here is more remarkable for its consistency over time and the coherence of the larger picture. Long expressed UK Government opinions have crystallised since the referendum as the DEFRA policies outlined in Health and Harmony (February 2018), the Agricultural Transition Plan (November 2020) and now as being followed through. However they may be expressed, the policies continue to be for the improvement of productivity and of the environment with the focus moved to outcomes from processes.

Successive Prime Ministers and DEFRA Secretaries have declared that they are moving from managing the decline of nature to improving it. Moreover, the Government in general (and DEFRA in particular) is bound by its own new legislation, notably the Environment Act 2021 with its statutory environmental targets, its Environmental Improvement Plans and the creation of the Office for Environmental Protection (OEP) as a monitor and lash on government. While the ministerial merry-go-round has seen the setting of those targets slip, the OEP was swift to admonish. After today’s Financial Statement, we look for a torrent of delayed DEFRA decisions.

The choice between continuing to develop a new scheme or developing an established scheme will turn on what is more capable of achieving the major changes required as the carbon reduction, biodiversity improvement, air and water quality and other policy objectives of Government become more insistent. The demands of those objectives have been developing faster than the schemes, limited by the first smaller cuts from Basic Payment and perhaps bogged down by co-design. That is not a matter of totems and shibboleths but a pragmatic question for the hard world of practical delivery: which option would achieve most with least risk?