On Back British Farming Day this week, farmers accused the Government of failing to live up to their promise to reward them for providing ‘public goods’ – those services which are so essential to a healthy society such as clean and plentiful water, carbon-capturing woodlands, and thriving wildlife. This was the promise of then Secretary of State, George Eustice, when he published Defra’s Agricultural Transition Plan in 2020 and claimed it constituted the greatest change to farming policy in half a century.

This was to be a policy for the farmers of the future. A brave new world in which farmers, for centuries the custodians of our countryside, would finally be justly rewarded for wildlife-friendly farming and taking action to restore nature. An opportunity to reverse the catastrophic declines in British wildlife, driven by outdated agricultural policies and a broken food system which is failing farmers as much as it is failing the environment. A chance to do things differently.

Yet in the three years since the Government published their path to sustainable farming, the clarity and purpose which launched this new farming policy has been lost. A scathing report from the National Audit Office in 2021, swiftly followed by a report from the Environmental, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, identified early signs that Defra was at risk of jeopardising the effectiveness of its new Environmental Land Management (ELM) schemes and highlighted the risk of repeating the failures of previous policies, which achieved high uptake but failed to drive significant environmental outcomes.

Both reports set out clear recommendations to get ELM back on track. Both were ignored. In December of that year the Government published the first details of the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI), and it was clear that these warnings had fallen on deaf ears. The Wildlife Trusts, along with the RSPB and The National Trust, condemned the lack of ambition and support for farmers to take action for nature and climate. Farmers too were left wanting, calling on the Government to maintain momentum and ramp up support for nature-friendly practices.

Since then, ELM has become an increasingly watered down, directionless scheme which simply is not capable of driving the pace, scale, or depth of environmental delivery required to meet our national commitments on nature and climate. Defra has abandoned commitments to protect funding for the most high-ambition actions needed to reverse nature’s decline and tackle climate change, and pivoted back towards retaining farming policies which were part of the EU’s much-derided Common Agricultural Policy. Any sense of helping formers grow their ambition seems to have disappeared.

Instead, farmers who want to move further and faster for nature are now being denied access into the very schemes they were promised would support them as basic payments are phased out. There has been huge demand for ELM’s Landscape Recovery projects – oversubscribed more than 3 times over in its first round – and the Countryside Stewardship Higher Tier, both of which attract higher payment rates in return for more ambitious actions for nature. Incredibly, failure from Defra to adequately support these two schemes has left many farmers who were willing to take up high-quality environmental action out in the cold, having been told there wasn’t enough capacity to accommodate them. This has led to hundreds of farmers this week calling on the Secretary of State to urgently invest in high-nature value options.

The reality is that in 2024 we will have a farming policy full of broken promises and failed ambition. Defra has caved into the industrial farming lobby and lost sight of its purpose and earlier commitments. Rather than focus on paying farmers well for the public goods they deliver, they have instead focussed on securing the highest uptake possible – environmental delivery be damned. This direction towards a ‘broad and shallow’ approach contradicts the evidence of past schemes, which have shown that undirected options without defined and measurable outcomes fail to deliver environmental ambitions. The result is a policy of lowest common denominators, and it is failing farmers and nature. The Treasury will not see results justifying a continued £3bn spend on a policy which is not delivering.

The Government must listen to the growing number of farmers, land managers, and land owners who are calling for change. Defra must rekindle the original ambition outlined in the Agricultural Transition Plan, and place the environment at the heart of food and farming policy. Higher-paying, higher-ambition actions are needed to ensure the Government makes good on their legally binding commitments, and on their promise that farmers will be justly rewarded for taking action for nature and climate.