In The Wildlife Trusts’ press release ‘Government U-turn on promise to reform farming post-Brexit’ issued yesterday (13 June), we responded to the publication of the National Food Strategy and also reacted to a farming blog which was published by DEFRA a few days before.
We criticised the Government’s u-turn abandoning its commitment to protect a third of the future Environmental Land Management budget for its most ambitious tier – Landscape Recovery – by 2028. This commitment was stated in a policy paper in January this year and in the UK Government’s Net Zero Strategy, which was published ahead of COP26.
Henry Dimbleby’s independent review of the National Food Strategy also set out a recommendation to guarantee the budget for agricultural payments through to 2029, with a third of the ELM budget (£500-700 million) to be spent on paying farmers to manage their land for nature-based solutions.
The National Food Strategy did not adopt this recommendation, and instead states that offers under ELM will respond to “farmer demand” – a significant change in stance. Defra’s blog published last week also confirmed their new intention to “allocating the budget flexibly to respond to demand”, rather than targeting interventions based primarily on environmental need. The blog states that funding for Landscape Recovery will be limited to £50 million for the next 3 years (compared to “more than £2.5 billion on the new Sustainable Farming Incentive, Countryside Stewardship and its successor, Local Nature Recovery”).
As a result, we now have huge concerns as to how Defra will ensure that funding for Landscape Recovery doesn’t get lost to high-demand but low-ambition elements of ELM, as we have seen in the early offer for SFI. For Defra to achieve their commitment to achieve a third of funding for Landscape Recovery by 2028, they would have to rapidly scale up investment exponentially from 2025, a hugely demanding ask.
We are aware that there has been significant confusion around this issue, not least on Twitter where different takes on the implications of the National Food Strategy publication have been discussed. A report in The Sunday Times this weekend (quoting both The Wildlife Trusts’ chief executive, Craig Bennett, and the RSPB) has also come under scrutiny for the claims it made.
We have contacted Defra to get clarity on this issue, but they have been unable to confirm that protection of funding for Landscape Recovery remains in place. Instead, they have responded saying that the way 3-way split in funding was never a hard and fast commitment and has always been highly caveated. But if you read the Defra policy paper on ELM January 2022, you will see this promise has been broken.
Their response signals a concerning reversal on their previous commitment to fund landscape-scale change needed for nature and climate in England, and an abandonment of a genuine Brexit dividend in releasing funding from the Basic Payment Scheme to be allocated to nature’s recovery. Restricting this funding will limit the Government’s ability to meet its target to halt nature’s decline by 2030, reduce carbon emissions, and, ultimately, tackle the number one threat to food security – biodiversity loss and climate change.
We stand by our press release published on Monday. We will continue to engage with Government on this issue, and will be pushing Defra to produce a public statement clarifying their position on Landscape Recovery.