Jeremy's Blog 30th June 2023: Winds of Change

This article by Jeremy Moody first appeared in the CAAV e-Briefing of 29th June 2023

The gathering winds of change for farming not only see England now well advanced in its agricultural transition but each of the three devolved areas have their new post-Basic Payment regimes come into place from 2025.

Within some 32 months, DEFRA has now put in place the largest part of the key architecture for its agricultural transition:

• farming will now have no more direct payments, put more clearly on its business mettle
• entitlements have gone and the reducing payments are now to be legacy personal income
• laying out the course of the new schemes reusing the money with much of SFI to be in place from August and Landscape Recovery moving into its second round
• the array of productivity and innovation grants
• the Animal Health and Welfare Pathway.

Delinking makes the seven year transition only relevant for the run-off of Basic Payment. We do wait on news of the enhanced Countryside Stewardship with its role for habitats, woodlands, peatland, floodplains and other larger change – expected this autumn. That is now the policy framework for farmers to make their commercial decisions in markets about production and their businesses. It makes a flexible tenancy system important for easing these changes.

In Wales, the Agriculture Bill now only awaits Royal Assent, enabling the Sustainable Farming Scheme to start in 2025 and fully replace Basic Payment by the end of the decade. Northern Ireland has laid out its gathering programme of change, apparently acting under the Climate Change Act and to be fully in place by 2026. Much of the talk on last Friday’s CAAV visit to the Royal Highland Show was of the coming Scottish legislation with its tenancy law changes and the proposed four tier structure for payments conditional on climate change, nature and other requirements from 2026.

DEFRA’s hedgerow consultation shows England looking at the coming end of cross compliance, that implicit deal since the late 1980s whereby low commercial returns (and then land occupation) are subsidised in exchange for some commitments. All parts of the UK have acted to temper the EU’s disproportionate approach to penalties but now take different courses.

Greater English hedgerow controls would be part of the law for all farmers, whether they take any scheme money or not – what was heralded as the “regulatory baseline” – but with a structure of civil sanctions. However, Scotland has announced that it will add protection of peatland to continuing cross compliance, presumably bearing on lowland peat in arable areas as much as in the highlands and flows country.

England’s hedgerow proposals and water resources legislation in Wales both point to a more piecemeal approach than was first canvassed here. The Welsh Bill does not provide for the expected National Minimum Standards and DEFRA does not now talk of the regulatory baseline.

Nonetheless, we can foresee a changing balance from new schemes paying for change to regulation requiring it, as for water quality, animal welfare and other areas. England may, this year and next, offer good money for improved slurry storage but watch for the emphasis to move to management techniques and technologies and then to new unfunded statutory requirements for storage.

That process is being complemented by environmental designations. The international “30 by 30” commitment that 30 per cent of land be managed for nature by 2030 is part of the justification given for yesterday’s 3,000 ha extension of Cornwall’s West Penwith SSSI with all the statutory requirements to bring such areas into good environmental condition. The land sparing/land sharing argument develops.