Jeremy's Blog 5th May 2023: Competition for Land Use
This article by Jeremy Moody first appeared in the CAAV e-Briefing of 4th May 2023
Competition between a growing number of different uses of land is an increasing part of many of our major policy debates and poses as many challenges for environmentalists as anyone else. While there are synergies between overall goals there are also conflicts. Making progress on managing climate change, restoring nature, ensuring food and recovering control of energy involves significant, potentially rapid, change with important trade-offs and discomfort for some, enhanced by urgency.
The new renewable energy powered electronic economy requires minerals, many now dominated by China or places like Congo. We are now prospecting for lithium in Cornwall while Germany reopens a flourspar mine closed for 27 years – each battery in a VW ID.4 requiring 10kg of the mineral. Geology means that many such minerals are in areas valued for landscape and nature, sensitivities seen in the development of the Woodsmith polyhalite mine in the North Yorkshire Moors. The enormous scale, pace and regulatory change of what is required to achieve a truly renewable energy economy challenges many shibboleths.
With a part of the Lincolnshire Coast, Natural England has now started a rolling programme of new and larger National Nature Reserves while the broader scope of the extended West Penwith SSSI is likely to bear more on farming. Proposed expansions of marine nature reserves have seen conflict with local low intensity inshore fishing, as for Lindisfarne and the west coast of Scotland. In the EU, draft nature restoration legislation is prompting concerns about limiting infrastructure and offshore turbines as well as agriculture.
We can now see housing moving to the centreground of the 2024 election. Localism’s parliamentary triumph in 2022 has driven the effective collapse of the core of government housing policy as many areas resist change, protecting what they have. With short supply, the government considers how to subsidise affordability for first time buyers.
Labour’s Keir Starmer now seems to be picking up the issue of housing supply, at least for electoral rhetoric, telling this week’s Economist: “I think we have to take this on. It will require tough decisions” and the Times recording “That will require us to be bold when it comes to things like planning.” “Tough” is the word. Not only do some Labour front-benchers (like some ministers) oppose development in their areas but delivering this is likely to conflict again with commitments to local government. Alongside the 300,000 dwelling target, there is talk of looking again at the Green Belt, the Oxford-Cambridge Arc and new towns with councils to co-operate regionally. These become interesting battle lines while market pressures, design codes, energy efficiency and other factors make housebuilding more costly.
In all this discussion, food production may sometimes appear the residual, overlooked use. A strategy focused on using the least productive land to achieve the greatest combined outcomes for nature and food (“land sparing”) has value but only goes so far with real choices faced over, say, lowland peat while the locational requirements of renewable energy and its connections are not respecters of land quality. Meanwhile, the requirement for food production itself drives change, not only challenges farming for non-food, energy uses but highlights the need for productivity improvement and technical development. What we have inherited from the cushions of the CAP will need to change, as newly unsupported businesses respond directly to evolving markets.
The chief executive of Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, the world’s largest, points to climate change as a driver of higher food prices for years to come (Financial Times, 26th April). Recent months anyway point to the management of risk in food production and supply with the balance to be found between resilience, efficiency and cost. That again highlights the farmer’s need to find, win and hold the financial margin that would justify the increased risks in difficult produce markets and volatile times and so confirm agriculture’s place in this competition.
Across the landscape, the outcome lies in the interplay of statutory action (designations and compulsory purchase), guidance (planning strategies) and the personal choices of owners and occupiers. DEFRA’s promised Land Use Framework will be part of this but openness to change and managing well are now essential and urgent.