Jeremy's Blog 2nd December 2022: DEFRA Policies Reaffirmed

This article by Jeremy Moody first appeared in the CAAV e-Briefing of 1st December 2022

Two striking points about DEFRA’s agricultural and environmental policies, with their twin themes of improving farming productivity and the environment, are that:

• they are the principal area of post-Brexit policy development, with the Agriculture Act 2020 as the first major post-Brexit statute
• even with all the political turbulence, never minding the normal uncertainties of political life, the goals have remained consistent with no current reason to suppose change.

For farmers, to be seen as businesses, the focus is on improving performance with the offer of options for agreements for practices or changes for the positive environmental improvement and other public benefits that is the other object of policy.

These policies reflect both longer-standing government thinking on agricultural policy and the commitment, growing since 2010, to reverse environmental decline, rather than slow or halt it. There is a clear line through early 2018’s Health and Harmony paper and the 25 Year Environmental Plan, the Agricultural Transition Plan of November 2020 to the Secretary of State’s speech today taking forward an enhanced Countryside Stewardship Scheme to deliver DEFRA’s “ambitious outcomes” rather than invent Local Nature Recovery as a new scheme.

It is worth seeing that larger picture. It is inevitable that different announcements will have different emphases. June’s Food Strategy was more about business and next year’s Environment Improvement Plan would be just that, but they should be seen together. Despite the febrile furore over the “rapid review” by new ministers of the present state of policy implementation announced in September, its remit covered both innovation and environmental stewardship – there was no real sign of change.

This is not just England. Scotland is expressly framing its future policies as part of its climate change plan. The Welsh Sustainable Farming Scheme will re-use Basic Payment to buy public goods. Northern Ireland has the same concerns.

Labels change but, as always, look at the facts. Whether environmental land management or ELM, names have moved from Tiers 1, 2 and 3 to the more recently labelled schemes and now the potential for developing the Countryside Stewardship Scheme, already with 35,000 farmers, to be a better and less risky means to achieve the more demanding requirements that had been envisaged as Local Nature Recovery. These are simply the means to achieve policy goals, evolving pragmatically outside the constraints of CAP negotiations and disciplines.

It is more significant that those policy goals appear to be very quickly becoming more demanding. The increasingly urgent and overlapping concerns of climate change, biodiversity, air quality and water quality will increase the expectations of both these schemes and regulation. The prospective statutory environmental targets, delayed in the recent ministerial merry-go-round but to be set very soon and then monitored by the Office for Environmental Protection, will be demanding for government and farmers alike. Whether developing Countryside Stewardship or creating a new scheme, the challenge will be meeting the land use changes and local outcomes intended.

One important constraint on delivery is the scale of money so far released from Basic Payment. It is only as we move from 2022 to 2023 that substantial funds become available to fund new schemes. It is unrealistic to think that major new schemes could be in place without that money.

As that money has become available and decisions again come from ministers, the first parts of SFI, the much-expanded Countryside Stewardship entry and the early rounds of the Farming Investment Funds are now joined by the first round of the Slurry Infrastructure Scheme and a pilot for new entrants’ skills. Larger options are to come for farmers to consider on their merits.

The direction of travel is clear. Two years into the Plan and as more money becomes available, so DEFRA reviews its vehicles for the journey.