Opinion: Whitehall’s message is ‘you’re on your own’
© Tim Scrivener For any still unsure about the medium-term implications for British (or at least English) agriculture of leaving the Common Agricultural Policy, the government’s Budget of 30 October did at least finally put their curiosity out to pasture.
The sunlit uplands promised back in 2016 have not, under successive governments of varying political persuasions, materialised.
As I write this, the furore over changes to agricultural property relief (APR) seems to have consumed all coverage of a Budget to which it was only supposed to be a footnote.
See also: Opinion – farmers can’t pay for society’s ecological conscience
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But the more immediate concerns were the announcement of a freeze in budget for the Sustainable Farming Incentive/Environmental Land Management (ELM) and the surprise flourish that residual, delinked direct payments would be effectively axed next year.
To widespread dismay, Labour was the only major party not to promise an increase in the budget available to farmers to aid uptake of sustainable land management in their 2024 manifesto.
Although the widely trailed cuts to Defra’s funding didn’t materialise, merely freezing the ELM budget at the increasingly world-weary £2.4bn figure does mean an increasingly acute real-terms fall in the money available.
Agricultural input cost inflation (44% since 2019) continues to erode a sum which was never designed for the sort of heavy lifting across both food production and the environment that it is now being asked to do.
The surprise loss of residual BPS payments will be felt immediately by farm businesses already, in many cases, crippled by months of extreme market volatility and extreme weather.
That the schemes designed to return this money to the sector remain only partially available seems of little concern to ministers.
In reality, we shouldn’t be surprised to be arriving at this destination; successive British governments have for decades made clear that domestic food production is not a priority.
A key benefit of CAP membership was to keep the farming budget locked into a seven-year cycle and away from direct competition with more ravenous government departments.
The inevitable conclusion is that the industry must look to its own devices, with Treasury support a fickle element of farm cashflow forecasts.
Indeed, hidden in the budget detail, government encouraged “farms with greater resources [to] pursue ways to improve productivity and diversify without expecting the same level of direct state support”.
To translate from the Whitehall-ese: ‘You’re on your own’.
There are novel structures out there which may be worth a first (or second) look in these circumstances.
Farmer clusters are a good place to start in terms of taking a more collaborative approach to the farmed landscape (with that collaboration potentially stretching beyond natural capital to farming activities and infrastructure too).
Meanwhile, Environmental Farmers Groups – farmer-led co-operatives – are starting to form across the country, helping farmers make a fair return on trading biodiversity net gain, nutrient neutrality and carbon.
Landscape Enterprise Networks also exist to help farmers leverage payments from the regional economy to provide services in that area, while there’s an increasing premium market for “regeneratively” farmed produce.
And yet I believe the crass myopia of recent governments will prove to be short-lived.
In an increasingly unstable and uncertain world, the fundamental requirement for a thriving farming sector is too obvious to continue to ignore.
In time, this Budget paper will become chip paper, and agriculture will occupy its rightful place at the heart of our nation’s future.