Policy paper

Environmental land management schemes: outcomes

Published 6 January 2022

Applies to England

Farming in England is moving away from the arbitrary land-based subsidies and top-down bureaucracy that epitomised the EU era, towards schemes that recognise the work that farmers do as stewards of our natural environment. Our reforms will support productive and sustainable farming and food production alongside environmental, climate and animal welfare outcomes. We are working with English farmers, in partnership, to design our new systems and support the choices that they make for their own holdings.

This document sets out our environment and climate ambitions for the 3 new, complementary environmental land management schemes. We have previously set out our vision for the future of farming payments in England via the Agricultural Transition Plan, its update in June 2021 together with Payment Principles which will govern scheme design, and further documents including a Written Ministerial Statement in December 2021.

These schemes will, alongside food production: improve water quality, biodiversity, climate change adaptation and mitigation, air quality, natural flood management, coastal erosion risk mitigation and access and heritage. In all cases we will fund the actions that have the greatest possible impact, ideally across multiple outcomes, and avoid negative impacts on important features (for example, on sites of special scientific interest, scheduled monuments or other relevant aspects of our historic environment).

By 2028, we currently expect spending to be evenly split across farm-level, locally tailored, and landscape-scale investment. All schemes will be designed to pay for public goods which go above and beyond regulatory baselines and won’t pay for the same actions twice. They will also not crowd out private finance for climate and environmental outcomes.

All of our new schemes will be voluntary; it will be for farmers to decide what the right combination of actions is for their particular setting. We are designing our schemes to be accessible, supportive and with fair compensation to incentivise high levels of uptake, leading to our ambitious outcomes.

The Sustainable Farming Incentive focuses on making agricultural activities more sustainable and will pay for actions that all farmers can choose to take. This scheme will pay for actions that can be taken at scale across the whole farmed landscape in order to have the most impact. This includes reducing inorganic fertiliser and pesticide use, taking care of our soils and improving farmland biodiversity, water quality and carbon sequestration.

Local Nature Recovery is the more ambitious successor to Countryside Stewardship, paying for the right things in the right places and supporting local collaboration to make space for nature in the farmed landscape. This scheme will particularly contribute to our targets for trees, peatland restoration, habitat creation and restoration and natural flood management.

Landscape Recovery will pay landowners or managers who want to take a more radical and large-scale approach to producing environmental and climate outcomes through land use change and habitat and ecosystem restoration.

Our aim is for at least 70% of farmers, covering at least 70% of farmland, to take up Sustainable Farming Incentive agreements, and for Local Nature Recovery to attract significant numbers of farmers and land managers. We have committed to delivering at least 10 Landscape Recovery projects covering over 20,000 ha between now and 2024. With these levels of uptake, the new environmental land management schemes will make a significant contribution to many of our most important key targets and ambitions.

We’re aiming to bring up to 60% of England’s agricultural soil under sustainable management through our schemes by 2030. As a result, we expect to see an increase in soil biodiversity (invertebrates and fungi, for example) and soil organic matter which in turn will contribute to improved water quality, flood risk management and carbon emission reductions.

We will support farmers to significantly reduce agricultural emissions, for example by reduced use of inorganic fertiliser through more efficient and sustainable nutrient management. We anticipate the collective actions of farmers under our environmental land management scheme agreements, together with the Farming Innovation Fund which will fund the deployment of new technologies, and our other farming offers we will decarbonise agricultural emissions by up to a total of 6 MtCO2e per annum in Carbon Budget 6 (2033-2037) in England. Further to this we will also continue to pursue further opportunities through the schemes to support farmers and land managers’ contribution to delivering our Carbon Budgets, including through tree planting and peat restoration.

We are already committed to trebling woodland creation in England by the end of this Parliament. As well as woodland creation we will also support agroforestry, wood pasture and hedgerows (including trees) within the farmed landscape. We will provide a range of ways for farmers to get involved in woodland creation and maintenance. If we see our intended levels of uptake of our new environmental land management schemes, then we will maintain our target levels of woodland creation and restoration to 2030 and beyond together with restoring and maintaining up to 200,000 hectares of peatland in England by 2050. This will build on the more than £750 million from the Nature for Climate Fund over this Parliament.

Farmers and land managers will play an essential role in halting the decline in species, including farmland birds and insects, by 2030. The schemes will offer choice of support for more regenerative approaches to farming, and creation or restoration of habitats in appropriate areas. Through wide take-up of our schemes, there is potential to create or restore up to 300,000 hectares of habitat by 2042, and bring over half our Sites of Special Scientific Interest into favourable condition by 2042. This will support the delivery of the Nature Recovery Network and contribute to our target to protect 30% of our land for nature by 2030.

We will pay farmers for activities which significantly reduce the main agricultural pollutants that enter watercourses, specifically nitrogen, phosphate and sediment. Farmers will be rewarded for actions such as minimising nutrients entering water courses, integrated pest management, and preventing the runoff of soils from fields for example by keeping ground covered over winter. Our new environmental land management schemes will operate alongside a wider policy framework for tackling nutrient pollution which also includes regulation, proportionate enforcement, and a role for financing nutrient mitigation measures by the private sector, including the water industry as part of a holistic approach to effective catchment management. This will help to achieve our targets for cleaner water, including reaching or exceeding objectives for rivers, lakes, coastal and ground waters that are specially protected, whether for biodiversity, bathing/public use or drinking water as per our River Basin Management Plans.

We will support the restoration of rivers, lakes and other freshwater habitats on farms and in the wider countryside through Local Nature Recovery, for example by paying farmers to create and protect habitats on less productive areas of their farm. We will also invest in river restoration at landscape scale through the first round of Landscape Recovery Projects.
  
Alongside our new environmental land management schemes, we are also planning reform of agricultural regulation. This will streamline and simplify the system, taking a fairer, more proportionate and more effective approach, targeting the outcomes that have the most impact on our goals in a clear and applicable way. We are working hard with industry on how to achieve this and will provide more detail on this in the coming weeks.

We will update and adjust our aims, and the design of our schemes, as we expand the offers available under the schemes, and as we learn from our pilots. We will also keep our aims under review as we develop long-term legally binding targets under the Environment Act, and set out the policy pathways to meet them under our update of the Environmental Improvement Plan due in 2023.