During a Public Accounts Committee session, James questioned Defra officials on forthcoming changes to financial support to farmers, highlighted the importance of wellbeing and mental health as reforms are introduced, and questioned if the new schemes would be simple and not unnecessarily bureaucratic.
For more than 40 years the UK was part of the EU’s Common Agriculture Policy which provided financial support to farmers and rural development funding. In 2019-20 farmers in England received over £1.8 billion in direct payment subsidies, based mainly on the amount of land farmed. Following Brexit, DEFRA is developing the Future Farming and Countryside Programme which wiil consist of schemes targeted at enhancing the environment, protecting the countryside, improving the productivity of the farming sector and improving animal health and welfare.
At the core of these plans is the Environmental Land Management scheme (ELM) to replace CAP. Instead of CAP direct payments based on the amount of land farmed, ELM will pay farmers for undertaking actions to improve the environment. It has three components, each of which will be launched in full in 2024:
- The Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) will be open to all farmers and will pay them for actions to manage their land in an environmentally sustainable way.
- Local Nature Recovery will pay for more complex actions that deliver benefits at a local level and aims to encourage collaboration between farmers.
- Landscape Recovery will support large-scale projects to deliver landscape and ecosystem recovery through long-term land-use change projects such as large‑scale tree planting and peatland restoration.
James highlighted concerns an arable farmer had raised with him about the new schemes and the need for better developed schemes or to pause the changes until they were ready. Officials provided reassurance that more detail will be published next month and that there is advice available to help manage the change. James flagged the anxiety that farmers were feeling over the need for more detail so that they can properly plan. In doing so he praised the work of YANA in providing rural mental health support in Norfolk and other areas.
Another area of concern that has been raised with him is complexity of new schemes. James spoke about the impact of "Clarkson's Farm" series following Jeremy Clarkson's Diddly Squat Farm and what Clarkson has referred to as Defra's "unnecessarily bureaucratic approach." He challenged officials to meet the Clarkson test to make then simple.
The Public Accounts Committee is holding an inquiry as part of its work looking at public spending and the environment. Over two evidence sessions, the Committee will question representatives of farming and conservation groups, and senior officials at Defra and the Rural Payments Agency on whether the ELM is being well designed and managed to meet its objectives.Central to Defra’s proposals is the Environmental Land Management scheme (ELM), the primary mechanism for distributing the funding previously paid under CAP.
