Jeremy's Blog 27th January 2023: DEFRA Lays Out Environmental Schemes

This article by Jeremy Moody first appeared in the CAAV e-Briefing of 26th January 2023

DEFRA has today set out in over a hundred pages its approach, schemes and options in England for this year and 2024. It offers six new SFI standards for 2023, each now with options, not in separate levels, and their payment rates, some now moved from Countryside Stewardship and developed. The picture is given for Countryside Stewardship, now enhanced to carry the load that had been intended for Local Nature Recovery. HLS agreement holders will have access to new options. Countryside Stewardship Plus is now to support collaboration between neighbours and Landscape Recovery is to be extended in 2023.

With that overview, there seem several important points:

• the options are not offered as packages but more a set of interlocking menus with the potential to combine and stack options, mixing and matching between SFI and Countryside Stewardship as DEFRA sees what best encourages farmers to buy into its objectives
• the options have now more obviously moved on from a classic agri-environmental approach to being more securely linked to the very demanding carbon, biodiversity, water quality other objectives for change
• they are though no more than options – no one has to take them but they could assist farms seeking resilience or profit or pursuing objectives already in mind but that should have regard to the costs and unwanted changes they might require
• they will also help frame farmers’ and landowners’ decisions about competing markets in farm production, private environmental goods, forestry and other uses.

In summary, the announcement and prospectus now offer a basis for practical planning by businesses and landowners, that planning benefiting from advice and discussion with trusted advisers.

The focus on buying change is the point at which these schemes, re-using 35 per cent of Basic Payment this year and a half next year, begin to answer the government’s statutory objective for net zero and England’s new statutory targets for biodiversity and water quality. Last week’s adverse report from the Office for Environmental Protection (OEP) commented on how far we are short of the previous targets of the 25 Year Environment Plan and, in particular, said

“The large majority of land in England is in agricultural use. Inarguably, Government must incentivise farmers and landowners to play their full part in achieving the Government’s stated specific goals for the environment, and to maintain good stewardship of the nation’s countryside. Without their participation over the long-term, Government cannot succeed in protecting, restoring and improving the environment to meet its stated ambitions.”

The goal of halting and then reversing the decline in biodiversity looks more demanding than has perhaps ben appreciated. A recent global review has described the Biodiversity Convention dates of 2030 and 2050 as “a time frame that is short for ecological restoration and many biodiversity outcomes”. We now have just seven years to reach the “30 by 30” commitment to manage 30 per cent of land for nature by 2030.

We have to be aware that the other policy tool is regulation, better at stopping actions than encouraging them and so seems more used to protect water quality from nutrients and sediment. As cross compliance goes, so England will develop the regulatory baseline and Wales its National Minimum Standards, to be expected of all farmers whether in schemes or not.

Thus, these schemes have heavy lifting to do but may now have some of the money and practical detail to start on that role. These announcements reflect the new approach of outcomes rather than prescription with policies now evolving in response to experience.