A new framework for how England balances nature with food production and other land use priorities has been broadly welcomed, but not everyone is fully on board with the detail. By Nick Hughes.
“Our land is our greatest natural asset – the source of food, the bedrock of nature, the support system of the environment on which we all rely.”
With this lofty declaration, the UK Government kicked off its long-awaited consultation on a new land use framework for England which could trigger the most significant change to the fabric of the countryside in decades.
It’s taken quite some time to get here. A plan for how best to use England’s land was a key recommendation from Henry Dimbleby’s national food strategy back in 2021. It was promised, but never delivered, by the previous Conservative government and was pledged again in the election manifestos of the two leading political parties.
So what is the Labour government actually proposing?
The idea is to create a framework that helps balance the competing – and sometimes complementary – demands on the land from food production, housing, energy infrastructure and recreation, while making space for healthier ecosystems that restore nature and help meet climate goals.
It’s a huge challenge and one that, if handled indelicately, is ripe for fermenting anger and division among key stakeholders like land owners, farmers, conservationists, local communities and house builders. Some of the initial national newspaper headlines (“Tenth of farmland to be axed for net-zero”) sought, somewhat cynically perhaps, to pit farming in opposition to environmental targets.
The reality is more nuanced. Although the proposal is for some of the least productive agricultural land to be taken out of production and for other land to provide environmental benefits alongside food production, the government said it foresees no net reduction in domestic food production due to productivity improvements and innovation (deployment of precision breeding technologies for example) on the most productive land.
Defra secretary of state Steve Reed made clear in a speech to the National Geographical Society that the government is committed to maintain long-term food security. “The primary purpose of farming will always be to produce the food that feeds the nation,” Reed said, adding that the decision on how to manage land “will and must always rest with the individual farmer or landowner”.
Generational shift
Reaction has on the whole been positive, although some dissenting voices have questioned the detail behind the proposals rather than the overall ambition.
Sue Pritchard, chief executive of the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission which first proposed a land use framework in 2019 and piloted it in Devon and Cambridgeshire, said the consultation was “an important step forward”.
Bramble Partners, the food systems consultancy co-founded by Dimbleby, described it as “a once-in-a-generation shift in how England uses its land” and “a major step towards tackling the biggest land use challenges of our time: food security, climate change, nature recovery, housing, and clean energy”.
The National Farmers Union was more equivocal in its response. “With competition for […] land ever increasing, and to deliver on the government commitment that food security is national security, we must have a land use plan in place, underpinned by sound science and evidence, that has British food at its heart and ensures we make the best use of our most productive agricultural land,” said NFU president Tom Bradshaw.
Share not spare
Some pioneers of the organic and regenerative farming movements, meanwhile, have expressed concern that farming systems that support both food production and nature recovery have been undervalued in the framework in favour of a “land sparing” approach whereby some land is freed up for nature and the rest is farmed using so-called sustainable intensification techniques whereby yields are increased without adverse environmental impacts.
“It all sounds very compelling, but with a degree of trepidation and some qualifications, I am suggesting that this is a wrong strategy,” wrote organic farmer and Sustainable Food Trust chief executive Patrick Holden in a LinkedIn article. “Instead, I believe we should adopt a land sharing approach, producing food in harmony with nature and keeping as much agricultural land in production as is possible, even that considered poorer quality.”
Holden expressed concern that farmland categorised as of the highest quality would remain intensively farmed and reliant on chemical inputs like fertilisers and pesticides to maintain self-sufficiency in staple products. And while he accepted that a certain amount of land should come out of production to create space for nature, “that must not [be] at the expense of a land sharing strategy”.
‘Three’ is the magic number
What the government is proposing, in essence, is for a ‘three compartment’ approach to land use as proposed by Dimbleby in his food strategy and further developed in a 2022 report by the think tank Green Alliance, which would see the least productive land used for nature, the most productive land used for food, and the remainder used to deliver a mix of food, nature and carbon removals.
Currently in England, two thirds of land is used for agriculture. Arable land represents 38% of the total and is mainly used to produce crops for food and animal feed. Grassland accounts for 29% and is primarily used for animal grazing. Less than 1% of land is used for horticulture, with woodland, peatland, housing, infrastructure and inland water accounting for the rest.
These overall figures mask significant regional variations in the type and quality of England’s agricultural and rural land. For example, much of the most productive arable farmland can be found in the east of England, where the land is largely flat and the summers are generally dry. The gentle hills and wetter climate of the south west make it a natural home to around 40% of England’s dairy herd, while hillier upland areas across the country, including along the Pennines, tend to consist of lower quality farmland and predominantly feature sheep farming.
For this reason, the government says different types and degrees of land use change will be required in different parts of the country. In total, it estimates the land use change needed to deliver England’s environment and climate commitments amounts to 1.6Mha by 2050, around one-fifth of the total utilised agricultural area (UAA).
This figure is made up of different categories of land use change. Around 1% of agricultural land will need to undergo small changes that broadly maintain the same use while introducing nature into fields, through buffer strips for example, and on the margins to provide environmental and climate benefits alongside food production.
A further 4% will involve more significant changes that deliver environmental and climate benefits, mainly by incorporating more trees alongside food production.
Another 5% of agricultural land will be subject to changes in use whereby the land is being farmed mainly for benefits other than food; examples might include the creation or restoration of species-rich grassland habitats, responsible management of peat (a major source of carbon emissions), and planting of short rotation coppice.
The final category, responsible for 9% of land use change, will see the lowest quality agricultural land taken out of production altogether and fully dedicated to delivering environmental and climate benefits through, for example, the creation of woodland or coastal and lowland heathland habitats.
Tensions and trade-offs
Pulling all of this together in a workable framework will not be easy. One of the reasons campaigners have been calling for an overarching land use strategy for so long is due to the way in which land use interacts with other foundational government priorities and policies with the result being that tensions and trade-offs are not effectively managed.
The government says the new framework will interact with a number of other policies including the revised environmental improvement plan, a 25-year roadmap for farming and a national food strategy, which will bring together all aspects of the food system around four pillars of health, growth, environmental sustainability and food security. It will also be intertwined with the strategic spatial energy plan, which will set out how the government intends to hit its target for 100% clean power by 2030, and the ambition to build 1.5 million new homes.
Tensions have already played out in the media over the installation of solar arrays on land that could otherwise be farmed, fuelling concern that the drive to increase renewable energy supply will come at the expense of food security. The consultation document suggests these fears are overplayed: analysis shows the land area taken up by all key utilities across England in 2022, including solar and wind farms, power stations, water works, gas works, and refuse disposal places, covered just 0.2% of the total.
Still, these are complexities ministers will need to navigate during an intense period of consultation, including regional workshops and minister-led roundtables, ahead of publication of the final land use framework in the summer. That document will include the principles the government will apply to any policy with land use implications along with a description of how policy levers will develop and adapt to support land use change. Defra also plans to release a new tranche of land use data and analysis to support improved decision making.
It all adds up to a radical new approach to how we use our land with lasting consequences for our food system. The incentive to get this right could hardly be greater.
