Jeremy's Blog 22nd September 2023: Recalibrating to Meet Environmental Policies

This article by Jeremy Moody first appeared in the CAAV e-Briefing of 22nd September 2023

What a moment to be starting on a professional career as an agricultural valuer. Having spoken this week to the new entry at the RAU and soon to speak at Harper Adams, students are starting their courses leading to the profession. Across the country, people are starting their first employment and their practical training. Both groups start at this fascinating time when so much is now open for change and all the work that brings. Much of this and how the CAAV best supports members in this was discussed with young valuers at the successful Young Valuers Conference in Warwick two weeks ago.

Whether it is food production and farming productivity and how that might change, adapting to the impact of climate change (see the webnote checklist noted below) and mitigating it, developing renewable energy at the scale needed, responding to the issues of biodiversity and nature or any of the other issues we confront, so much comes back to how rural land is to be used and managed – at the core of the profession’s work with the people managing and owning it.

We also see a moment of Government taking stock, reviewing policies put in place over the last 10 or 15 years for their fitness as the continuing basis for meeting policy objectives, outside the constraints of EU law but with deadlines nearing. The low hanging and least disruptive fruit for reducing emissions are likely to have been picked already; the challenge of tackling harder tasks while keeping public assent will only grow. A policy such as MEES, based on EU legislation 15 years ago, may have made gains and aided understanding though burdening the let sector but would not stand being enforced on owner-occupiers in the way that might achieve major results, never minding finding the contractors.

The Uxbridge by-election was seen to show that, in straightened times, it is imprudent to tell people in January 2023 that just eight months later they must pay significant money to use their cars. The need is too great to ride that risk.

While biodiversity has a kinder language, the risk in tackling climate change has long been that it comes with the language of the hair shirt, of personal mortification in the cause of virtue, imposing disruptive and expensive change on individuals. This understates the sheer scale of change needed to answer the challenge; imposing discomfort is not an effective answer but accepting larger change is necessary. It will not be answered by a few solar panels on house roofs and ponds but by quadrupling the generation of non-fossil fuel power by 2050 with all the infrastructure needed to get that power to people. Economy-wide changes at industrial scale will then drive markets in which people react, encouraged to find their way to change.

We wait for the statement on the grid while the recent failure of the offshore wind auction may matter much more than not pursuing MEES further in England.

Similarly, the last two weeks’ contentions over nutrient neutrality are about the effective ways to achieve the very demanding environmental targets that have been set. How far should that be so focused on new housing rather than more widely? The testy exchanges between the new Office for Environmental Protection, finding its voice, and DEFRA over this show the tensions to be worked through in best meeting the targets set and the trade-offs that follow while maintaining an economy that aspires to pay for public services and public assent for government.

Climate change and the other challenges will not be answered by magical thinking, just wishing, declaiming and posing but by hard policy work and sustained implementation at scale, facing real choices and taking people with the process.

The practical end of this, advising individual owners and farmers, will be the work of many of those now starting their careers with the CAAV.