Sustainable Farming Incentive: Species Management and ELMS

Lord Bishop of Norwich Excerpts

Thursday 25th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Norwich]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow a fellow tree planter, the noble Lord, Lord Robathan. I give a tree to every person I confirm as a sign of the care of God’s creation. I am grateful to the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, for securing this debate. I declare an interest as a member of Peers for the Planet and as a Church Commissioner.

Landowners and conservationists with whom I have spoken have broadly welcomed the changes to the sustainable farming incentive, not only the increased payment rates, which make uptake more attractive, but the new areas of action, the increased flexibility and the promise of a simpler, clearer and faster application service. Let us hope it does what is says on the new, streamlined tin. This better-rounded and more holistic agri-environmental scheme in England will undoubtedly see a greater uptake across all agricultural sectors. The tools are certainly in place to help deliver both sustainable food production and nature recovery.

In particular, I welcome the new emphasis on soil health. Being under our feet, we too often forget it, but soil is perhaps our greatest natural asset and the key to so much nature recovery. I am glad that the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, shares my enthusiasm for soil. Healthy soil supports a range of environmental, economic and societal benefits. These include food production, climate change mitigation and increased biodiversity. These vital soil functions are at risk from poor soil management or inappropriate land use, leading to soil degradation, soil compaction and soil erosion from wind and water. Ecological breakdown of our soils together with climate change are perhaps the primary threats to food security.

Of course, any change to a scheme, or the start of any new scheme, needs the test of unintended consequences, and I see three risks that I would be grateful if the Minister could address. First, I am conscious of the acknowledgment from the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, of the incredible commitment of farmers and the added stresses and challenges of new schemes. With the increased options that are now available through a single application process, will farmers be supported in the uptakes of those applications and given the right advice and support? Can the Minister say what advice and support will be given to applicants, particularly so that this public funding secures the most value and delivers effective environmental outcomes? We do not want to find, in future years, that we have been paying for suboptimal or even perverse outcomes for nature.

Secondly, it is critically important that farmers, once in ELMS, are taken on a journey of increasing ambition for nature. There is a risk that farmers remain on sustainable farming incentives, the lowest level of ELMS, and pick the low-ambition, free-choice, well-funded options that align with their existing farming actions. This will not deliver the widescale change in farming activity needed to restore declining wildlife populations. If we are to progress towards the targets in the Environment Act, we need a more joined-up nature landscape, with wildlife corridors, acknowledgement of the impact of edge effects and some clear understanding of which species we want to protect, recover or thrive. If we want to continue to hear the magnificent call of lapwings, curlews or corncrakes, clear strategies need to be developed across whole landscapes. Yet in all this, there is a risk that high-quality, high-yielding land will be taken out of food production in favour of higher payments for environmental goods. Can the Minister say how the correct balance can be struck that benefits these various competing areas, so that we can maximise both food security and nature recovery?

Finally, ELMS is just one side of the coin when it comes to nature and farming. Funding to encourage nature-positive farming needs to be underpinned by the right level of regulatory baselining to prohibit actions that cause the most damage to nature. However, the announcement by the Government said almost nothing about regulation, other than to review the relationship between Natural England, the Environment Agency and farmers and landowners. This is at a time when EU regulatory legislation protecting hedgerows, soils and watercourses came to an end on 31 December last year. This cross-compliance has now dropped out of UK law, leaving regulatory gaps in these areas. We urgently need a new regulatory framework, starting perhaps with the swift progression of the replacement hedgerow protection proposals that were consulted on last summer; they have yet to be replaced. My final ask of the Minister is for a firm commitment that protections for nature will, at the very least, be maintained this year at the same level as the old regulations.