Rural Estates Newsletter February 2023 - Flipbook - Page 4
1 – ELMs: what we know now
Elizabeth Earle
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“No longer possible to say ELM is a mystery” read the recent Farmers
Weekly headline. Following hot on the heels of Mark Spencer’s (Minister
of State for Food, Farming and Fisheries) speech at the Oxford Farming
Conference, the publication of Defra’s policy paper on ELMs on 26
January (the prospectus) suggests that the roll-out of ELMs is finally
gathering momentum and is beginning to show what sort of fruit it
might bear. But much remains unclear.
Known knowns
The Agriculture Act 2020 (the Act) enacts the mechanism for withdrawing the UK from the
Basic Payment Scheme (BPS) under the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and replacing
it with a new UK-based system of support. The Act provides for a seven-year agricultural
transition period (although that can be extended) from 2021 to 2027. During that time, BPS
will be phased out and new financial assistance schemes will be phased in. Section 1 of the
Act sets out what is meant by financial assistance and echoes the theme of “public money
for public good”, but it is the Delegated Powers Memorandum and the 2020 policy paper
on the agricultural transition plan which put flesh on the bones and introduce the language
of Environmental Land Management schemes, or ELMs for short.
Money going out: 2023 is the last BPS claim year and next year delinked payments will
replace it (their value based on the value of BPS from the reference period years of 2020
to 2022). However, progressive reductions have been applied to BPS since 2020, and
reductions will continue to be made to it (and delinked payments) until the end of the
transition period. Assuming you have farmed during the reference period and claimed
BPS in 2023, you are entitled to claim delinked payments, regardless of whether you
even continue farming. Cross compliance ceases to be relevant, although as many of the
standards are in fact statutory requirements, they will continue to bind on that basis.
Money coming in: it was stated by the minister at Oxford, and subsequently repeated,
that the same level of funding (just under £3bn) available to the sector under BPS would
continue to be made available to the sector and there would be no siphoning off of
funding. But how?
Initial uptake of the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI), proposed as the most accessible
tier of ELMs and in which Defra would like 70 per cent of eligible farmers to be enrolled,
has been poor, amid reports of payments being “modest” and a conspicuous absence of
detail. Although the recent announcement of a “management payment” of £20 per hectare
for the first 50 hectares may have looked suspiciously like buying support, the recent
publication of the prospectus suggests the government has realised it must try harder on
the points that really matter. Bluntly put, it must tell farmers what they have to do and what
they will get paid for doing it. Many of the prospectus’ 129 pages set out precisely that
for the (now) nine SFI standards. Payment rates are more attractive, and although critics
suggest it favours arable, over, say, moorland or hill, it feels as though government is now
taking ownership of the scheme.
The second tier of ELMs was to be Local Nature Recovery, but this was officially scrapped
in Thérèse Coffey’s speech to the CLA on 1 December 2022 in favour of extending and
enhancing the existing Countryside Stewardship schemes (CS). CS Plus is to be added
too, aimed at encouraging farmers to tackle carbon and biodiversity with their neighbours.
And if there seems to be a blurring of the boundaries between SFI and CS, that’s entirely
intentional: further down the road a single “menu” of land management options is foreseen.
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Rural Estates Newsletter
February 2023