Policy paper

Local Nature Recovery: more information on how the scheme will work

Published 6 January 2022

Applies to England

Local Nature Recovery is the improved and more ambitious successor to the Countryside Stewardship scheme in England. It will pay for locally-targeted actions to make space for nature in the farmed landscape and the wider countryside, alongside food production. This could include, for example:

  • managing and creating habitats
  • adding trees to fields or hedgerows, or
  • restoring peat or wetland areas in appropriate areas of their farm

Countryside Stewardship has become a successful scheme, attracting 40% more applicants in 2021 than in the previous year. We’ve been working hard to simplify and improve the scheme, to make it more attractive for people to participate in. We’ll be updating the payment rates for Countryside Stewardship shortly and will continue to refine and improve it.

However, we know that there is potential to go much further than just refining what we have. Through our tests and trials, we’ve seen:

  • the huge potential for farmers to work together to deliver outcomes – such as the 23 Burns project in Northumberland, where more than 52 farmers have collaborated to determine how they could deliver for the environment in a coordinated way
  • the power of farmers getting involved in determining local priorities, and how they can be delivered through land management planning. For example, farmers in North Devon have shown that it is possible to develop and produce shared priorities and plans for how they could go about delivering bigger, better and more connected outcomes
  • the opportunity to make schemes less bureaucratic and take more of a partnership approach to delivery – for example the land management board created by the Broads Authority bringing farmers together with other stakeholders to implement their plans and to make decisions on local priorities
  • the potential to combine private and public income – such as through the creation of the Eden Model by the National Trust, Green Alliance, United Utilities, Nestlé, and 3Keel, where the accompanying toolkit outlines the 5 steps to initiate and complete successful transactions using public and private income streams.

Local Nature Recovery will take the best of Countryside Stewardship and add some of these new elements. This will help create a scheme with wider appeal that can deliver more and better outcomes, in a less bureaucratic and more supportive way.

Local Nature Recovery will:

  • provide a range of options (much like Countryside Stewardship), so that farmers can choose the right combination for their setting and preferences
  • be straightforward to apply for and administer, building on the simplifications we’ve already made to Countryside Stewardship
  • have a fairer and more proportionate system of checks and controls, rather than the punitive regime we’ve seen in the past
  • support and reward people for working together to achieve outcomes
  • work in a locally responsive way to support the right things being done in the right places (such as coastal habitat restoration in coastal areas or peatland restoration in areas with peat)
  • dovetail with private schemes and markets for high-quality, accredited environmental outcomes, ensuring that private finance is crowded in

It will complement the Sustainable Farming Incentive. Farmers will be able to enter into both schemes, provided the actions are compatible and we’re not paying for the same actions twice, building a tailored agreement that works for them. The Landscape Recovery scheme will pay for longer-term land use change and habitat restoration projects.

What we will pay for

Through Local Nature Recovery, farmers will be able to contribute to important national priorities, including:

  • reversing the decline in biodiversity
  • improving water quality
  • net zero
  • building the resilience of the environment to climate change
  • improving air quality
  • natural flood management
  • coastal erosion risk mitigation
  • heritage and access

Local Nature Recovery options will include those that have been effective under Countryside Stewardship, as well as a wider range of new and more ambitious options to support our aims.

The Local Nature Recovery options will initially cover the following themes:

  • managing feeding, shelter and breeding areas for wildlife on arable farms
  • managing, restoring and creating grassland habitats such as species-rich grassland on farms and in the wider countryside
  • managing, restoring and creating wetland habitats such as ponds, lakes, reedbeds and fens
  • managing, restoring and creating lowland heathland
  • managing, restoring and creating coastal habitats such as sand dunes, salt marsh and shingle
  • managing and restoring areas of upland and lowland peat and moorland on farms and in the wider countryside
  • targeted measures to support the recovery and reintroduction of particular wildlife species, such as creating and managing nesting and feeding habitat, and to tackle non-native invasive species
  • managing and creating trees and woodlands, including agroforestry, traditional orchards and tree planting on areas of farms – noting that the England Woodland Creation Offer will be the main scheme for woodland creation until 2025
  • nature-based solutions for water – such as creating and managing in-field vegetation, buffer strips and swales to reduce and filter runoff and contribute to natural flood management
  • restoring rivers, flood plains, streams and riparian habitats

In designing Local Nature Recovery, the intention is to take forward and build on our experience of management actions in Countryside Stewardship Mid Tier offers, as well as more tailored activities on sensitive sites as per Countryside Stewardship Higher Tier or Higher Level Stewardship offers.

We will work with farmers and other experts to design the detailed options over the course of this year. In designing options for the scheme, we will take into account:

  • their potential contribution to the statutory targets we will set under the Environment Act, including our new target to halt the decline in species abundance by 2030, and our Net Zero and climate change adaptation commitments
  • affordability and value for money for the taxpayer
  • their coherence with private schemes and markets for climate and environmental outcomes such as carbon offsets, biodiversity net gain, and nutrient credits
  • their viability as options for farmers and land managers to deliver and for government to manage effectively

We will publish more details on the full list of options later this year, alongside more details on scheme rules and proposed payment rates.

We want farmers to be able to enter into private arrangements such as carbon trading, providing biodiversity net gain units, and nutrient trading, alongside their involvement in government schemes. We are considering how best to make this work and are committed to ensuring that farmers are better off when they seek private financing opportunities. We will continue to develop our thinking in this area with farmers and investors over the next year. We will set out the rules on this clearly in the scheme rules that we publish before launching the scheme, which will build upon the payment principles published in June 2021.

Farmers and land managers play a critical role in managing and protecting our most precious protected sites, such as Sites of Special Scientific Interest, and we will support them to continue to do so. It can sometimes be more expensive or difficult to manage these sites, for example due to remoteness or difficult terrain. Over the coming months, we will work with stakeholders to ensure the options under Local Nature Recovery are suitable for people farming or managing land in protected sites, and how we can safely transition arrangements for protected sites under existing agri-environment agreements into new schemes.

Eligibility

Local Nature Recovery will be open to farmers, foresters and other land managers who can deliver the land management activities the scheme pays for on their land. As 70% of land in England is farmed, we expect agricultural land to make up the majority of Local Nature Recovery agreements.

Farmers will be able to be paid for undertaking Sustainable Farming Incentive standards and Local Nature Recovery options on the same parcel of land where appropriate, provided the actions are compatible and we’re not paying for the same actions twice. The scheme will also be open to foresters and other land managers to look after important habitats and natural resources.

From 2024, it will no longer be necessary for people to navigate multiple schemes and forms to access different ways to get paid to produce public goods. Both the Sustainable Farming Incentive and Local Nature Recovery will be accessible through a simple digital service that shows each farmer all the options available to them.

We will provide a smooth way for people to transition from existing schemes like Countryside Stewardship into our new environmental land management schemes from the end of 2024 onwards.

Common land will need a single entity for entering agreements. We will work closely with stakeholders to design this, building on what works in existing schemes and the work we have already done to design the Sustainable Farming Incentive.

Collaboration

While most agreements for Local Nature Recovery are likely to be individual, nature does not stop at farm boundaries and joining up nature wherever possible is crucial to its recovery. The same goes for water management. When people work together, they can achieve substantial socio-economic benefits and higher quality and better-connected environmental outcomes. We see this from examples of cluster farms already working together for nature, carbon and water management alongside food production.

We’ve found in our tests and trials that local facilitators can really help people to work together. We will work with farmers and other experts to set up a new facilitation offer that builds on the successes and lessons to be learned from the Countryside Stewardship Facilitation Fund. It will be open to anyone eligible for any of our new environmental land management schemes. Meanwhile, the latest round of funding for the existing Countryside Stewardship Facilitation Fund opened for applications in December.

We are also looking at additional ways to encourage and enable farmers to coordinate their activities to deliver more and better outcomes in their area on behalf of the public. This could include information and incentives for additional outcomes delivered through joining up activities across multiple holdings, such as wildlife corridors or focussing on specific priorities like water quality in a catchment. We will continue to test different approaches to this throughout 2022 before we start to roll out the scheme in 2023.

Land management plans

Through our tests and trials, farmers have told us that land management plans are a good way to assess the potential to deliver environmental benefits on their land, and monitor and record progress. They can also reduce the risk of poorly planned or located actions.

Our tests and trials have generated a range of approaches and templates for land management plans, and highlighted further issues we need to work through before we can confidently introduce land management plans as part of our new schemes.

Through this year we will be doing further work to establish how land management plans might be used as part of the Sustainable Farming Incentive and Local Nature Recovery.

Agreements and monitoring

Local Nature Recovery agreements will cover multiple years, with the length dependent on the activities being undertaken. There will be flexibility to allow people to add more options or land into their agreement over time. We will continue working with farming experts to make sure the scheme is accessible to tenant farmers and those farming common land.

Overall, we will foster an approach to checking compliance that is more supportive and less punitive for minor discrepancies than previous schemes, whilst preventing fraud or other illegality and addressing more substantive failings where necessary. We will build on the improvements we’ve made in existing schemes, where we are making greater use of advisory letters and support, rather than automatically applying penalties where we find things that aren’t quite right but the farmer is prepared to take timely action to remedy.

We will test approaches that could help make our checks more efficient and risk-based. For example, we will test how remote monitoring could be used as an alternative to in-person site visits (building on work we’ve already done on this in our existing schemes) and how earned recognition could help us target our checks.

Piloting and testing

It is important that we test the scheme with farmers so we can be confident it will work, particularly the new elements that have not been included in previous schemes. The way we do this will be different to the Sustainable Farming Incentive pilot. We have already learned a lot from our tests and trials and from existing schemes, so we don’t need a full pilot over several years. Instead, we will focus on testing things that are new or different, in the most efficient and effective ways possible over the next year.

We will particularly focus our testing on:

  • how land management plans are incorporated and how they should work
  • how we make the application process and related processes more straightforward for applicants
  • how we decide and implement local priorities, including how the Local Nature Recovery scheme and Local Nature Recovery Strategies complement each other
  • how we incentivise local collaboration
  • our approach to making compliance fair and proportionate
  • how those in existing schemes can transition to Local Nature Recovery in a way that is simple and effective
  • how we can crowd-in private finance and ensure coherence with private schemes and markets

We envisage testing and piloting activities with up to 500 participants, representing a range of sectors and both those already in and those not in agri-environment schemes.

We will publish more information later this year on how we will undertake testing, and how farmers can get involved.

Timings

We plan to make an early version of the scheme available to a limited number of people in 2023 as part of our plans for testing and rolling out the scheme. We will then roll out the scheme across the whole country by the end of 2024.

Ahead of this, the best way for most farmers to get involved in delivering environmental outcomes is to enter into the Sustainable Farming Incentive later this year, the Countryside Stewardship scheme or other existing schemes such as the England Woodland Creation Offer or Farming in Protected Landscapes. We will also offer support to farmers through advisory services such as catchment sensitive farming. We will provide a smooth way for people to transition from these schemes into environmental land management schemes from 2024 onwards.

Over the next year, before we start rolling out the scheme, we will:

  • finalise and publish the scheme rules, the list of options and how much we will pay for them, and arrangements to support local collaboration as soon as possible – to allow people to plan their participation in the scheme
  • carry out more detailed testing of the new elements of the scheme with a small number of farmers, building on what we have already learned through existing schemes and our programme of tests and trials – we will publish more details shortly on how and where we will test the scheme and how farmers can get involved.