Jeremy's Blog 8th January 2021: What Now for Business and Land Use

This article by Jeremy Moody first appeared in the CAAV e-Briefing of 7th January 2021

Starting the New Year, we must look beyond the grim Covid-19 circumstances and the lockdown. They will pass, though it will take time and we need to keep continuity in commercial life while changes in property use and business practice will be accelerated by the pandemic and the counter-measures.

With the structural change triggered by the 2016 referendum, the UK left the EU last January and the Transition Period ended with 2020. The UK-EU Trade and Co-Operation Agreement for future relationship was agreed on Christmas Eve and approved before the New Year.

The absence of high tariffs on agricultural goods may see much remaining familiar as we come to understand the effects of new border controls. The Northern Ireland Protocol applies them to goods moving there from Great Britain, with issues for used agricultural machinery. The early New Year seems a quiet period for agricultural trade and much will have moved in late 2020. This allows time to prepare for the larger volumes likely as 2021 advances.

The UK and the devolved governments can now legislate outside the framework of inherited EU law; all are now doing so. The Agriculture Act is on the statute book, the Welsh White paper on future policy was published before Christmas. All parts of the UK, including Scotland, are now re-writing EU law, first for BPS and then more widely. England is now using its freedom to hold the consultation promised in July on gene editing, barred down by the ECJ.

Developing markets, public tastes, technology, climate change pressure, environmental concerns and other factors will all drive change with pressures on farm and estate businesses and so on land use.

The withdrawal of Basic Payment in England and then Wales will end the inheritance since at least the 1970s of subsidy support for broadacre combineable crops, beef and sheep. What might be the uses to which some such land might move? Where and how might food production be done? What and by whom? How might environmental offers from the state and private businesses affect that? We have yet to see the full scale of what climate change measures will require for rural land management and buildings, much of it very soon, by way of carbon sequestration and emission reduction.

Handling those changes will be the basis of much professional work with clients needing interpretation, advice and action. Our Future Skills programme has been preparing members for this.