Sustainable Farming Incentive: Species Management and ELMS

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 25th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I begin by thanking the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, for securing this debate and introducing it so comprehensively. It is a great pleasure to follow the noble Earl, with whom I share a considerable passion for soil health and soil quality, which we have often discussed.

I agree in some respects with the noble Earl’s diagnosis of why we are one of the most nature-depleted corners of this battered planet. The Green Party right across the EU has very much led opposition to the common agricultural policy, although the way in which it was applied in the UK seems to have been particularly poor compared with parts of the EU, in terms of environmental and biodiversity outcomes. However, it is important that we add in other causes of the problem and recognise that the Government need to take a comprehensive policy approach.

Just this week, we had a debate in the other place following very strong public backing of the petition to “get fair about farming”. Giant multinational companies hugely dominate our food system, and a handful of companies dominate areas such as factory farming of chickens. That dominance has squeezed farmers’ margins and forced them into farming systems that have done huge damage to the natural world. I put it to the Minister that we are talking about the SFI, and that the Government need also to take action from the other side and make sure that farmers are indeed allowed to manage their land as they would like to.

It is important in this debate that we look at the other context. The Government have been doing trade deals, letting into the UK food with standards considerably below the standards we ask environmentally, as well as animal welfare standards. All these things are acting against what the Government are putting money into through their farming programmes. These issues have to be looked at together.

I shall continue with the theme of the need for a systems approach. We are in a climate emergency and nature crisis; we have exceeded six of the nine planetary boundaries, as identified by the Stockholm Institute. It is in the British countryside where you can really see that happening. We do not talk about this as much as we probably should, but the UN last year pointed out that, in global terms, we have more problems with plastics in our soils than in our oceans, to which a great deal of attention has been paid. Since we are talking about biodiversity in general, according to the terms of the noble Earl’s debate, I was tempted to raise the issue of the biodiversity of our soils and the research conducted in the past year. We have started to realise the extent to which we are losing the biodiversity of the microbiome of the soil. I am aware that the Minister is new, so I am going to be kind and not push too far down this road today—but he can expect more of it in future.

I turn to the overall view of ELMS and the impact it will have on the targets of the Environment Act. I am sure that noble Lords have seen an excellent briefing from the Green Alliance that digs into that issue. It notes that this month’s agricultural transition plan update does not provide evidence of how the actions being encouraged by the update will impact on targets. We need to see how those are joined up. These are the Environment Act biodiversity targets that the Government are legally committed to, yet how do the two things relate to each other? We are not seeing the explanation, the figures or the setting out of that link. We have a list of schemes that will contribute to supposedly delivering the targets, but we do not know how or how much, and we are not seeing an evaluation of how much progress has been made. Is what is being suggested in this update enough to get us where we are supposed to be by 2030?

Even where there is some detail, it did not relate the action to what is currently included in the ELM scheme. For example, in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the biggest single measure identified in the plan is using SFI to reduce emissions through methane-suppressing feed additives for livestock. Yet the use of methane suppressants—however much I might question that—is not incentivised through any ELM scheme. Of course, your Lordships’ House—and the entire country—is acutely aware of the issues around the state of many of our rivers. The focus has tended to be on sewage and water companies but what is happening in terms of nitrogen phosphorous and sediment pollution from agriculture is a big part of the issues in the River Wye and in many rivers in East Anglia.

The Office for Environmental Protection says that the scale of reductions needed to meet the targets in the Environment Act may require

“up to 100% of farmers adopting nature-friendly farming”

methods. At the moment, as the noble Earl said, we are at 10%. We have a huge gap here that has not really been set out.

Looking at the context in which we are talking today, we of course have to focus on the recent report from the Office for Environmental Protection, which has to be described—fairly—as scathing. It acknowledges that there has been some progress made in the implementation of the ELM scheme but says that its rollout needs to be vastly accelerated. The OEP says that, overall, it is keeping in reserve the possibility of taking legal action against the Government for failing to deliver on their legally binding targets. That is the context we are in.

We are particularly focused on biodiversity so I will be positive here and welcome the fact that, among the 50 new environmental actions, the Government have introduced agroforestry and restoring water bodies and water courses—and I think, at least to some degree, ponds and mires, which is a really important area that has not had sufficient attention. If the Minister has not visited Wakelyns agroforestry in Suffolk, I would strongly recommend doing so. If you want to see a long-term agroforestry scheme in action, delivering what is visibly and obviously a wonderful level of biodiversity, productivity and diversity in the human diet, I would encourage going to look there.

Agroforestry is an area—I declare an interest, I suppose, as having a fellowship with the Horticultural Trades Association—where we ideally need a supply of locally grown trees from nurseries here in the UK. Perhaps the Minister can comment on how we will ensure that, if we go forward with this agroforestry, we can have locally grown trees suitable for local conditions all around the country—ideally native species, of course—while making appropriate adjustments for the impact of the changing environment of the climate emergency.

I also want to look at enhancing water bodies and water courses. I would be interested in any thoughts that the Minister might have about the restoration of ponds and mires. What we have seen with industrial agriculture—the flattening of hedges and large fields that the way we have administered the CAP has encouraged—is huge amounts of the filling in of ponds, which are absolutely crucial to biodiversity. In East Anglia, there are some really exciting developments whereby old ponds are being excavated, carefully and in the right way, by expert ecologists. They are finding that the seed banks still remain there and, in those ponds, species that we thought had been totally lost from an area are in fact recovering. They are there; we just have to give them the air, light, moisture and capacity to flourish. Are the Government doing enough and providing the advice and support that farmers need for this kind of restoration, which we need to see on a large scale? This also has huge benefits if we think, for example, about flooding and Slow the Flow; it is a really important measure from the perspective of impact benefit as well.

Now I come to a section where, I am afraid, I entirely disagree with the noble Earl: predator control. I am drawing here on the briefing from Wildlife and Countryside Link. It talks about the funding of the management of wild species that prey on farmland birds. Wildlife and Countryside Link says—and I agree—that this is

“a distraction from the core objectives of the scheme. As confirmed in the State of Nature Report of 2023, the decline in the abundance of farmland birds is primarily due to increase in intensive farming practices, not natural predation. Predators are a marginal factor in farmland bird species abundance, for a few species only”.

I accept the RSPB studies that the noble Earl questioned but I would go broader and point to the reason why, in some areas, we have such an abundance of predators. Of course, one of the key factors, which has been increasingly highlighted in recent years, is the massive release of large numbers of game birds, particularly pheasants.

We are talking about a slow, non-native, not-very-well-adapted-to-our-environment feast for our predators, so we have lots of predator numbers. Now, having released those pheasants into our natural environment, we are going to fund farmers to do predator control. There is a very obvious alternative: to stop, or at least massively reduce, the amount of release of food into the environment. Then we will have fewer predators. We might also have a bit more safety on our roads as well, as an aside.

What we need to do, looking at this in a systemic way, is ask what our entire countryside looks like. That is where I have to raise the issue of the land use framework, something long awaited that was dealt with at considerable length, in detail and quality, by a committee of your Lordships’ House. We need a vision of what the countryside should look like. It needs to be a holistic vision that guides the whole ELM and SFI schemes. What we really lack is an overall, long-term strategy.

On briefings, I point to the Nature Friendly Farming Network briefing for this debate, which very much majors on and focuses on the need for a long-term strategy. What we seem to be doing is offering some money for this scheme and some money for that scheme, but where is the picture of what the countryside looks like? We know what the vision of the countryside has been over the past few decades. It has been farms and fields getting bigger, grubbing out hedges and getting rid of trees. That was the vision. Now we are starting to establish a vision where we acknowledge that we need to restore hedges and bring back trees. We need a different kind of environment yet we are still a long way from looking at proper crop diversity—genuine diversity, not just two or three crops on a farm but scores of different crops on a farm. I come back to Wakelyns as an example of what I would say is the Green Party vision for what our countryside could look like and how rich it could be. We need to look at this in a holistic way.

I am almost out of time so I will come to one specific point because I hope that this debate will be a useful way of settling a debate that has been carried on in the media. As part of the rollout of these schemes, the Government said they would maintain the annual farming budget for England at £2.4 billion a year. However, the Guardian has looked at Defra figures and concluded that there were underspends of £110 million in 2021-22 and £117 million in 2022-23. The Government have said that those figures are untrue. It would be useful if the Minister could set out in a little detail, as time allows today, and say from the Dispatch Box whether he believes that that promise of spending has been met.