LEGAL

KEY PARTS NOT IN PLACE

Environmental law expert Richard Smith, a partner at Oxford based Sandstone Law, is worried that the new Environmental Land Management scheme (ELMS) will fail to attract enough farmers because key parts of the scheme are not yet in place.

The National Audit Office (NAO) has warned that “core” aspects of the scheme, set to replace EU subsidies delivered through Basic Payments, are yet to be agreed, and has warned that failing to launch ELMS effectively could reduce the number of farmers who participate and hit efforts to help nature and the climate.

Richard commented: “It is no surprise that so few farmers have signed up for the government’s new programme when its implementation has been so slow and key elements have yet to be published by DEFRA. “A consequence of Brexit, this is the UK’s new domestic agricultural policy, with a significant number of new regulatory arrangements to support it. It will bring in major changes, with a shift away from a traditional farming industry towards a framework for environmental management. “The government wants to introduce more stringent environmental protection requirements into the farming community, but there are concerns that this programme will affect smaller farmers the most and leave them exposed to obligations and costs that make their businesses unviable. This could leave UK agriculture in the hands of large agricultural corporations. “Farming businesses operate on multi-year planning cycles, and so farmers have an understandable desire for predictability. The farming industry has been affected by DEFRA’s previous difficulties in introducing changes successfully and the scale of the change DEFRA is now taking on is much greater. “If sufficient information and reassurance is not provided to the agricultural industry through the government’s implementation of the new system and it is forced in too quickly, farmers will be unable to prepare in the way they need to.” Richard said the NAO had warned that DEFRA had yet to establish objectives for what ELMS should achieve or set out detailed delivery plans past March 2022. It also said DEFRA had failed to regain trust from farmers over its management of past agricultural subsidy schemes to ensure high levels of participation in the ELMS programme. The first stage of the ELMS rollout, the sustainable farming incentive, is being piloted with 1,000 farmers from October, with plans to launch some core elements at scale in mid-2022. Richard said only 2,178 farmers had expressed an interest in the pilot, compared with DEFRA’s expectation that between 5,000 and 10,000 of 44,000 eligible farmers would come forward, according to the NAO. He said there had been delays informing farmers what actions they would be paid for and how much they would be paid.