Sustainable Farming Incentive: Species Management and ELMS

Earl of Caithness Excerpts

Thursday 25th January 2024 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[The Earl of Caithness]

That this House takes note of the announcement of changes to the Sustainable Farming Incentive by the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs on 4 January, and the case for including species management within the Environmental Land Management Scheme to support populations of endangered species and biodiversity in general.

[The Earl of Caithness (Con)]

My Lords, tonight is Burns Night. All around the world people will celebrate Scotland’s most famous bard and lyricist, but Burns was also a farmer whose poetry reflected his view of the natural world as a dynamic ecosystem that needed to be treated with care for the sake of us all and our fragile planet. Over the years his way of farming changed, and we ended up in 2020 lumbered with the discredited EU common agricultural policy. During that time farming gradually lost most of its vital connection with nature, which is one of the reasons why our planet is under such huge stress.

However, in 2020, with the Agriculture Act, the Government set out the new way forward for farming in England. The environmental land management scheme was to become the main vehicle for providing financial support to farmers in the future. The purpose of ELMS is to reward farmers, tenants, landowners, land managers, growers and foresters for delivering “public goods” and to make

“a significant contribution to the environment”—

something that Burns would have thought logical. The new scheme was to be phased in on a transitional basis, beginning in 2021 and ending in 2027. We are now half way through the transition period. It is therefore a sensible time to stand back and assess how it is working.

Transitions for most people are difficult and, like moving house, emotional. I pay tribute to the farming community, who are adapting to a new and evolving system, learning new bureaucratic and technological skills, while still running their businesses with many working seven days a week as well as having to coping with an increasingly changeable climate.

The transition has not been, and is still not, straightforward. Systems need to change and adapt as they are developed. The 2020 proposals of a sustainable farming incentive, local nature recovery and landscape recovery have evolved. There have been mergers of policy as well as additions and subtractions. This has added complications for farmers in joining, adapting and changing schemes: grants have been forgone and payment windows narrowed. This year farmers will receive a minimum 50% reduction of their direct payments, which for many are the only reason they are able to stay in business. To date only 10% have engaged with SFI.

There have been concerns about the speed of implementation and complexity of the scheme, the problems faced by upland farmers, the need for more clarity and certainty as to what farmers need to do, the need for tenant farmers to be able to participate fully and, inevitably, the amount of funding available. The Government have been accused of not providing adequate levels of support to farmers during the rollout of the scheme. The transition is clearly telling on some farmers, with calls to that excellent organisation the Farming Community Network showing a notable increase in stress and financial-related problems.

However, the overall feedback on ELMS has been that it is a good step and in the right direction. The Government have shown flexibility by addressing many of the concerns and further, much welcomed, improvements to the scheme were announced in and following the speech of my right honourable friend the Secretary of State on 4 January. Nevertheless, that speech did not alleviate criticism that the rollout of the new scheme has been too slow.

The Office for Environmental Protection, in its recent report on the progress of the Government’s policies for improving the natural environment in England, argued that while some progress had been made on implementation of ELMS, its rollout needs to be accelerated. The Country Land and Business Association has criticised the Government for not opening applications for the updated scheme until the summer of 2024, arguing that farm businesses urgently need more financial support now.

Getting more information and detail out to farmers quickly is a must. I join the National Farmers’ Union in wanting full details of the combined SFI/Countryside Stewardship scheme offer made available as soon as possible, along with a date for when the new application window will be open. The Tenant Farmers Association reminded me that a similar summer promise was made last year, but summer did not come until 1 September. I say to my noble friend: that is not acceptable this year. It must be much earlier than that.

It is good to hear farmers discussing how much of their output has increased and inputs reduced through farming in a more nature-friendly way. The improved payment rates for the SFI and Countryside Stewardship scheme are to be commended. However, farmers can now sign a five-year agreement using SFI payments, which give a better return than producing food but with no measurable benefit to nature. That might turn out to be a catastrophic own goal. Can my noble friend reassure me and the Nature Friendly Farming Network that a measurable level of environmental benefit will also be required in return for a grant?

The Government need to meet their environmental targets, in particular their commitment to the apex goal within the environmental improvement plan of thriving plants and wildlife. There is a legally binding target for species abundance by 2030, with a requirement to increase species populations by 10% by 2024. The Government have said that ELMS will support species recovery and management action by farmers, landowners and other managers. For the purpose of ELMS, the Government define species recovery and management as covering those actions which

“increase the abundance of particular species, including by managing other species (invasive non-natives and predators) that present a threat, and supporting rare native breeds”.

Given all the international agreements and conventions to which the UK has signed up, the additional national legislation, the increase in organisations interested in areas set aside for wildlife and the large sum of taxpayers’ money already spent annually on agri-environment schemes, this country should have a surfeit of wildlife. It does not, so one must ask: why has it failed so badly? One part of the answer is that it is widely acknowledged that there are three legs to the stool of nature conservation: providing habitat, providing good food sources, and legal predator management. The first leg has been available for some time and the second is more recent. They are options within SFI but the third is not—and a two-legged stool does not function well.

It is just too simplistic and naive to blame all the failure on farming operations. It is true that habitat provision through agri-environment schemes has produced benefits for certain aspects of the life cycle for a great many species. The provision of attractive nesting habitat, foraging areas in summer and winter, and winter food resources in the “hungry gap” has helped. The cirl bunting and corncrake are notable beneficiaries. The introduction of new premium payments for certain high-priority actions, including nesting plots for lapwing, is welcome. However, of deep concern are the many examples of the provision of habitat alone not halting decline of species, let alone bringing about recovery. I would mention puffins, Manx shearwaters, water voles, brown hares, grey partridge, black grouse, curlew and lapwing.

In 2015 and 2016, as part of the curlew recovery initiative based on the Shropshire/Welsh border, 30 nests were monitored to find the cause of curlew breeding failure in a significant local population in excellent habitat. In each year, only 1% of nests got beyond the egg stage to produce chicks. All chicks were subsequently lost. Over 50% of the egg predation was by foxes and 25% by badgers, which are protected, with crows also being a significant nest robber.

Approximately £23 million per year is spent on agri-environment options to support breeding waders on grassland, but given the poor results, one must question whether this is good value for money. Clearly, more needs to be done and there is good evidence across Europe that, where the provision of the right habitat alone has failed, the combination of habitat improvement and targeted, effective predation management can lead to the recovery of species of conservation concern.

As a result of a conservation programme led by the RSPB, Natural England, the Landmark Trust and the National Trust to exterminate the rats on Lundy Island in the early 2000s, sea bird numbers have been restored to levels not seen since the 1930s. For instance, puffin numbers have increased from 13 birds in 2002 to 375 in 2019. Despite this species management success, the RSPB still argues that management does not work. Its recent research on the response of breeding waders to predation management is arguably flawed, as it did not apply predation management to the level of intensity recommended by professional game and wildlife managers. That meant that it was always likely to be ineffective—possibly, that is what it was designed to be. It was also unethical. If one is going to take one species in support of another, one needs to ensure that one’s approach is effective. Furthermore, if the RSPB claims that species management does not work, I wonder why it is a partner in the project to eradicate stoats, which have been posing a threat to Orkney’s internationally important wildlife since their introduction there in 2010.

The Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust, or GWCT, has proved the RSPB wrong on predation management of wildlife on farms. Thirty years of careful scientific research on its commercial demonstration farm in Leicestershire have demonstrated that numbers of songbirds, and other wildlife numbers across the farm, are significantly higher when there is proper species control than when there is not. It has followed the three-legged stool principle and, with management, songbird numbers have doubled alongside a commercial farming operation.

It is good to read reports of the water vole, better known to some as Ratty in The Wind in the Willows, returning to areas in which it once thrived. They were virtually wiped out, mostly due to predation by mink, which decimated whole colonies. Now, with the successful use of the GWCT-designed mink trap, numbers are rising again, proving that targeted management can benefit a variety of endangered species.

Given that it is so important to improve wildlife numbers, I ask my noble friend why the Government are not introducing a set of funded standards to contribute towards the cost of the management required to aid the recovery of species, especially those on the red list, when there is so much evidence to prove that it works.

The Government have set a good course for the future of farming. It is farmers and land managers who will make it work, or not, within the remit set by Defra. The recent welcome announcement makes ELMS more attractive to farmers to sign up to. However, farmers, as well as producing food, must be required to demonstrate that the taxpayers’ money they receive is producing public goods that make a significant contribution to the environment. Species management can help in that and should be added to the SFI options. If there are no public goods, the Treasury will be much more inclined to reduce Defra’s budget than to increase it. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Earl of Caithness (Con)]

My Lords, I am extremely grateful to all noble Lords who have taken part in this debate. I also conscious of my noble friend Lord Robathan’s remark that “less can be more”, so I will curtail quite a lot of what I might be able to say.

However, I want to pick up one point made by the right reverend Prelate. He might not be aware, but it was due entirely to the work of the noble Baronesses, Lady Bennett and Lady Hayman, and myself that we got soil into the environmental improvement plan. It was promised through the soil health action plan. It was the pressure that we put on the noble Lord, Lord Goldsmith, that got the Government to change their view. It is a pity that the soil health action plan was not implemented, because the OEP is having great difficulty in getting any measurement of how soil can be improved.

I am extremely grateful to my noble friend the Minister. Again, we are lucky enough in this House to have a Minister who is experienced in farming and the countryside and who understands the matter probably far more than his civil servants. When it came to his remarks about the difference between management control of grey squirrel and deer and control of other species, I thought he was dancing on a pinhead. His officials need to be kicked pretty blooming hard and told that they need a better argument than that.

The Government have set farmers legally binding targets for 2030, but they are not letting farmers have a full toolbox of measures to tackle that. There is a risk of creating perfect habitats with taxpayers’ money for a whole range of species which would just become population sinks unless there is more help for farmers in protecting those species from predators.

I hope that my noble friend the Minister will take two serious messages back to his Secretary of State and to No. 10. First, we need to get on with SFI schemes. It is no good just saying, “It’s going to be in the summer”; we want it as soon as possible. Secondly, we need more on predator management.

Motion agreed.