Good morning everyone, and welcome to this meeting of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee. Our evidence session this morning is part of our ongoing work on the scrutiny of the Department and its arm’s length bodies. We are delighted to be joined this morning by the Minister for Nature and her team. Welcome back to the Committee Corridor, Mary, since you have your own background with the EAC. Just for the benefit of those who are following our proceedings and for our own official record, would you and your colleagues introduce yourselves?

I am the Nature Minister.

I am deputy director for waste and recycling in DEFRA.

I am director general for the environment in DEFRA.

This is a timely appearance before the Committee for you, given the recent publication of the land use framework and other documents in the last few days. I want to start just by looking at the overall strategy and the land use framework and where this fits in. It is one of a number of strategies that we are getting from the Government that we are told are all intended to provide clarity about your priorities. Just on the question of priorities, the land use framework is going to have significant implications for the farming industry, possibly especially in upland areas; what should we read into the fact that it is the Minister for Nature and not the Minister for Farming who has responsibility for it?

That is a great question. We cannot overstate the importance of the land use framework. It is the first time we have published a blueprint of how we want to make use of our limited land to both grow the food we need and power the economy, build homes and restore nature. The good news from the framework is that we have enough land to do everything we need to do. We have done a bit of radical opening up of data, which I really welcome, and we have 12% of England’s land that is going to have to change use by 2050. But we are not prescribing what and how, or telling people how to change their land. We are just saying, “Here’s where the rain falls, here’s where the water rises, here are the places where you could grow trees, here are the areas where we need power lines,” and so on. We are basically trying to overlay all the different maps and bring it together into a cohesive whole. To your question of why it is the Nature Minister, not the Farming Minister, land is multifunctional and multipurpose. When we kicked off this work 18 months ago the decision was taken that it needed to be more than focused on farming—it needed to look at the multifunctional uses of land. We know that 4% of that 12% that is going to change will stay in food production but with agroforestry, with field margins and species-rich grassland, and 6% will need to shift to meet our climate and nature targets. That means restoring peatland—you mentioned the uplands—and creating woodlands, and I am sure we will come on to talk about the three new national forests that we have announced. Then 1% will be needed for housing and development, and 1% for renewable energy. The vast majority of farmland will stay in food production, but there will be some management changes and we are really keen to see improvement of soil health. I remember one of my 21 reports was on soil health back in 2017, reducing fertiliser inputs and using cover crops. I was not very enthusiastic then but I am a massive soil evangelist now. I just need to say something about where I used to work: Cranfield University has had a soils database and has been collecting soil samples—I do not want to say since the ’40s, but definitely since the ´60s. We have now put all of that data together with our data, and it is going to be on open release. A lot of powerful tools will be released as part of this framework, and yes, we are going to have the largest nature-related budget as the farming budget pivots towards nature-friendly farming. It is right that, rather than one or the other, we talk of both/and.

It is good news that we have enough land; as Mark Twain observed, they have stopped making it. But then, if you are going to maintain and, in fact, increase the amount of food production as population increases, and if you are going to be taking upland areas out of production, does this mean that we are going to be farming more intensively in lowland areas?

I don’t think so. We have Minette Batters’s farming roadmap.

Yes, the profitability review.

One of the sectors that we are looking at is horticulture because we import an awful lot of our broccoli, tomatoes and fruits, so there is the opportunity there to innovate; I do not know if innovation and more greenhouses count as intensification. There will be some land use changes. If you look at the rain maps and the propensity for forest creation, you can see that that is broadly down the entire western half of the country because that is simply where the rain falls at the moment. Obviously, the climate is changing. In terms of intensification we import roughly half of our food at the moment. I am not the Farming Minister so I do not really know the answer; perhaps Sally can come in on the intensification point.

We are making significant investments to support farmers to improve productivity. Just in terms of the specific phrases, we would not necessarily say intensification in terms of the intensification of inputs like nutrients, but about using those in a more targeted and efficient way to help farmers to drive up productivity.

What do you have in mind in particular, in terms of encouraging productivity?

We are supporting farmers through the Farm Equipment Technology Fund, for example, to enable things like precision application of nutrient fertilisers and other improvements to on-farm technology to help drive productivity.

Of the whole farming support budget, how much would that be?

It is £200 million through the Farming Innovation Programme up to 2030.

That is for productivity.

On productivity.

Is that to 2030?

Yes.

That is a pretty small proportion.

Yes, that is capital grants just through one programme: the Farming Innovation Programme. Of course, agroforestry is an innovation because if you are planting trees and shading your crops, the answer is that you actually shelter the early wheat from the winds and the hottest sun, which in some cases can be in May. So that productivity—

Planting trees is not going to make much of an immediate impact on that, though, I would have thought.

I think it is for the next five years.

Yes. That would be optimistic. The Government have to choose, and it sounds as if, at least for some areas of the country, you are choosing nature restoration over food production. Is that a fair comment?

We are not making those decisions: we do not own the land. We have about 10% of the country that is managed land—we call it the public estate—such as Salisbury Plain. We are never going to be farming there because it is MOD land and we need it for training exercises and things like that. We are working with that part of the land as well, to really work on the nature recovery part. But most of the land is held in private ownership, obviously, and it is for those owners and land managers to decide what will work best for them.

You have come up with fairly clear targets. In fact, you have given quite a lot more specification on this already today, but the land use framework itself is effectively advisory.

Yes, and it is the beginning.

At some point we are going to get the national spatial priorities map, which will be rather more prescriptive, will it not?

Whose map is that?

Do you mean in terms of the spatial development strategies?

Yes—who can do what and where.

In terms of agricultural land uses, I do not think we are ever going to be specifying and directing farmers to change the use of their land.

What is going to be the purpose of the map then?

We are continuing to develop our mapping in terms of energy and housing development, and bringing all those together as we continue to develop and make our spatial mapping in Government increasingly open. But that will not be directing farmers on how to use their land.

We saw some of that yesterday with the announcement about the seven new towns; again, you can start overlaying it. Pulling all these complex bits together is incredibly powerful. We are setting up a new unit in DEFRA and there is a new website—luff.gov.uk—but it needs to be constantly updated because things are constantly changing as land does not stand still.

We have the environmental improvement plan, the farming roadmap, which we are still to see. We have ELMS in a state of evolution, a circular economy growth plan, which I think we are still to see, and local nature recovery strategies. Where does the land use framework align with them?

It aligns as a foundation document. The LNRSs were set in progress by the previous Government, and when we came in we had a choice whether to stop them or carry on with work that is in flight. My belief is that no good work should go to waste and we do not want to stop good work. They are a really powerful convening tool; some places were moving faster; some places were confused. I understand you have been up to Staffordshire to look at what they have been doing there. We have slightly gripped the LNRS process, and there are some places where we have had to push a bit harder and where they are publishing a little slower. But the power of the LNRS is to get local communities together—planners, councils, spatial planners, and then all the NGOs and land managers—and say, “What do we think is our most precious land for nature?” Farmers had initial hesitation in some areas, saying, “We do not want to be part of this if it means we cannot do what we like with our land.” We have therefore been very clear that being part of an LNRS does not mean you cannot ever sell your land for housing or develop it in the way that you would wish to. The process is trying to follow the Lawton principles of landscape scale of restoration across the landscape and, critically, trying to bring people closer to nature and improving that access piece.

You have the land use framework then to inform the farm roadmap, which we understand is coming sometime later this year. That will then reflect the direction of travel. Again, it sounds like the direction of travel in the farming roadmap will be one that gives greater prioritisation to nature restoration and environmental measures than food production. Is that a fair comment?

I am not the Farms Minister so I am not sighted yet.

You have control of the land use framework, which informs the farming roadmap.

I do. What I would say is that early indications from Angela Eagle, my colleague who is the Farms Minister, are that we are keen to see more smaller farms coming into our nature schemes. We are trying to simplify, to crowd in more of those small farmers. Given there have been some historical underspends of the budget and then having to close it in our first year because of over-demand, we are going to try to have a first tranche in June, and then a second tranche opening in September. I know officials are working very hard on that, but beyond that I cannot really say more.

The land use framework makes a clear commitment to sustaining domestic food production. It is not just a land use framework for nature; it is a land use framework for all of Government’s objectives.

The NFU’s interpretation of the land use framework is, “Uplands are marked out for peak restoration, carbon storage and water management. Grazing will continue, but the direction of travel is clear—more environmental use.” There is not much in the land use framework that is going to be guiding upland farmers on what is expected of them. It sounds to me that what you are talking about here is quite a significant social, economic and cultural change. What engagement have you done with the communities who will be most directly affected by this?

The process has taken a long time: 18 months.

This has been in production for years—long before your Government. Everyone said they wanted a land use framework; you have actually done it.

Everyone talked about it, yes. I believe in show, not tell. We had a roadshow that went out and engaged with organisations and individuals right across the country. The official’s name escapes me, but they were out doing workshops talking about this and crowding in what people wanted from it, so this is very much a co-produced document. It is not like the man in the ministry sitting there with his slide rule and saying, “This bit,” and, “That bit.” We had a lot of debate about the maps: how much and what scale. On the one hand we wanted to be transparent, and on the other hand we did not want people looking and thinking, “Oh my goodness, I’m going to have to stop what I’m doing.” It gives people options. Having been out in Northumberland and talked to some upland farmers, I know they are really keen to protect their land and carry on being able to farm on that land. But, with three of the five worst harvests on record being in the last five years, there is an understanding across the industry that farming is changing because of these incredibly wet winters, these hotter, drier summers, and the water being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Much of that landscape in places such as Northumberland, Westmorland and Cumbria is there because of the way in which it has been farmed down the centuries. If you have not read James Rebanks’s books, I recommend them to you. It seems to me that you are asking the farmers to do something different now, and that really needs a pretty explicit level of engagement. From the figures you have given us and everything you have told us this morning, it sounds as if you have a pretty good idea of what that is going to look like, but they do not.

The data is all out there, so they can look and see where their farm is. This is not about telling people how to use their land; it is about the potential for more efficient land use and developing tools and data to help people make better decisions. I remember having a conversation at a party with somebody who had a family farm in Norfolk, and he said, “Oh, my parents are thinking about retiring. I’m thinking about whether we’re going to keep the house, whether we’re going to sell the land.” I said, “Oh, have you looked at what’s going to happen on the flood maps?” I brought a flood map up on my phone because I knew where to look, and it showed that it was going to be an island by 2050. This was on a Saturday night—you can take the girl out of EAC—but we cannot rely on people having friends who know. This is about radical open access to data and helping farmers see what is going to happen in their area: where the growth is going to be for housing, where food production is going to be prioritised, where we are looking at forestry and where we are looking at peatland. As I say, we have engaged with over 1,800 people and organisations as part of this.

Will there be help for a process of managed change here, if you are going to say to upland farmers in the Lake District or wherever, “Well, no, you’re not going to keep sheep there in the way that you have always done”?

We already have two big landscape long-term recovery schemes, again, started under the previous Government. Cumbria is one of the first ones where we are looking at how we hold more water on that peatland, on that landscape, how we improve water quality for that huge tourism destination that is the gorgeous Lake District, and how we work together with water companies and government money, crowding in water company money as well, and basically growing the pie so that farmers are able to stack different payments from different people in order to contribute towards better water quality and flood prevention further downstream. I have not visited, but the farmers that are involved in that are incredibly positive about what they are doing. It is about showing how the bio-economy—to use the technical term—can work in a changing climate.

You will know there is a lot of nervousness in some of these upland communities around species reintroduction in particular; I am thinking lynx and sea eagles. Again, not within your jurisdiction, but my own farm is in an area where we farm sheep and we have had sea eagles reintroduced. It is causing a lot of angst in Dartmoor and Exmoor. What impact will the implementation of the land use framework have on things such as species reintroduction?

We have done a good job over the last 25 years in terms of saving species from extinction; there is a positive success story to tell there. The release of the first wild beavers for 400 years down in Dorset and then in Somerset on National Trust land on the Holnicote Estate and further down in Cornwall, is basically letting nature’s ecosystem engineers do what they do best at a fraction of the cost that it would take for people or human engineers to be paid to do the same ecosystem services.

Would you like to see lynx and sea eagles reintroduced to parts of England?

We have plans to introduce more species. Everyone is obsessed with charismatic megafauna like lynx and sea eagles, but actually we are interested in butterflies, fungi, insects and stag beetles and all these small creatures that have been under huge pressure.

It takes a lot of stag beetles to kill a sheep though—not so many lynx.

I thought you would welcome the stag beetles.

I have nothing against stag beetles.

Let me come on to species. I do not have the file or any of my briefings open, so I am speaking off the cuff. We have no plans to introduce lynx. I want to do things that will work and that have community buy-in. The beavers need to be the right animal in the right place. They are not going to be released next to railway lines or roads where they can actually cause a lot of harm. A lot of the beavers that we are getting are the ones that have been illegally released in Scotland and are causing problems, so we are getting the problem beavers translocated, and we are very grateful for them, by the way.

ASBOs for beavers: anti-social beaver orders!

These are animals, they are not toys; so once you have introduced them, you have to be prepared for them to move. You cannot fence them. Lynx is a dangerous wild animal that you would need to have in a fenced enclosure. I do not think there is any landowner that wants to do a big enough fenced enclosure. There is a whole series of hurdles around that; there would need to be legislation change or a very large fence. Let me argue against myself: the lynx has had a bad rap. They are shy creatures that like eating squirrels and smaller creatures rather than sheep and lambs. If there was the right area where they could be released they could probably do a good job on tackling squirrels in some problem areas, but there are deer. I am not saying they tackle deer, but we need to have a squirrel strategy to deal with squirrel predation on our newly-planted woodlands; pine martins are doing that in Exmoor.

I am trying to keep up to time here, but before we move on, a species that is there already is the grey seals. The JNCC’s Seventh Quinquennial Review recommended greater protections for some UK wildlife such as the grey seal, but you rejected it. Why was that, and is the whole JNCC process still fit for purpose?

It is an incredibly important body and I have an extremely good and productive working relationship with it. It has brilliant scientists. It is absolutely vital, not least with our overseas territory biodiversity strategy; it was really pivotal to that. The quinquennial review looking at what needs to change is a very laborious and time-consuming way of doing things. We think there is a better way of doing it with a global nature Bill. We are looking at bringing this in as soon as parliamentary time allows, to do some of this updating through primary legislation and do it all in one go, rather than statutory instruments for this, that and the other species, which is incredibly time-consuming for DEFRA. We are doing a lot across a lot of different areas: I am sure we will talk about waste and things, but all of these require legal resource.

We could go on about this but time is pressing and we want a more detailed consideration of the land use framework on its own.

In terms of the detail within the framework, it clearly states that it is not intended to be a material consideration for planning, and likewise not a document that tells people what to do with their land. It appears to be neither carrot nor stick, so what is the point of it? How are you going to influence behaviour?

With great science and great data. At the moment we hoard all that knowledge and information. As I mentioned with the flood risk map, I know where it is, but the farmer’s son didn’t know. Why should everybody not have access? It is about radical access, and particularly combined authority. We do planning permission at district council scale and borough scale. This is really a tool for combined authorities to look at a regional scale and think about housing and energy in particular, and where that should be thought about. But at the moment the planning services locally have been really denuded, defunded and, in some councils, part-privatised.

This says it has nothing to do with planning.

It is about allowing access to people who are making planning decisions and people who want to build. The days of councils not having a housing plan and just not saying where they are going to build houses are over. What that led to, particularly in counties, was developers buying farmland, putting in for planning permission and—I have forgotten the actual title now, but because there was no strategic plan for housing they could just appeal and appeal and get it through. So you have these developments in greenfield sites, and so on. By mandating a plan for all local authority areas, they will be able to use this and see where the flood risk areas are where we should not build, or where there will be problems, and where the places are where it will be hard to get insurance. It just enables those regional and local planners to have a better feel about where to put things.

How is it going to influence behaviours in terms of farmers changing land use? If you are wanting to take land out of productive use and into environmental schemes and so on, other than saying what the situation is, or might be down the line, it is not actually saying to farmers, “This is why you should do it. Maybe this is the mechanism or the funding you would get.” It is just more of a, “Well, here we are, this is what we would like to see, but if it doesn’t work out there’s not much we can do,” because it has nothing to do with planning and it has nothing to do with telling people what to do with their land.

It is version one, so let us see how it develops. Let us see how people use it. It has only been out a week. Over time it will help people make decisions about passing on, selling and so on; they will make decisions about continuation and what things where. There is a range of advice and grants available. In the summer there will be the announcement about the money and how the money will stack up on some of these public goods that we want to see: cleaner air; cleaner water; richer, more species-abundant field margins, and so on.

The Prime Minister has very clearly stated on a number of occasions that food security is national security. Sally mentioned that this document will sustain domestic food production. Surely we should be ambitious: we should want to increase domestic food production, and yet this is saying that we should be taking productive land out of use. How do those things add up?

About 8% will change: 6% to meet climate and nature targets, 1% for energy and 1% for housing; 4% will stay in production. People have always bought and sold their land and used it for different things. One use changes and another use is found for it; that is just the normal way of running a land-based business.

Are you effectively saying that land that stays in productive use should be intensified? We are going to have to sustain the level. If you are going to take 9% out and the rest of it remains the same, we have to look at more intensive food production.

We have to look at more horticultural production and more fruit production in order not to be reliant, or to reduce our reliance, on imports and exports from other countries because, of course, that adds extra costs. We have talked about productivity gains rather than intensification: it is about getting more out of the land and farming more efficiently.

Did the land use framework team work with Minette Batters’s team on her review?

Yes.

The two things do not necessarily add up, in terms of what she is looking to achieve through her review not necessarily falling in line with everything in this. We also obviously have different Ministers responsible for different arms of this; it feels to me like nothing is really joined up. Is that a fair assessment?

The way the Government are structured, there are these silos. You might argue that they are artificial because actually everything is connected and everything relates to each other. I am not the Water Minister but water is an important part of what we are trying to do in the land use framework in terms of cleaner rivers and prevention of flooding. These arbitrary boundaries are joined, but there is a blending around farming and nature simply because of the pivot of the farming budget away from, “You have some land, you get an automatic subsidy,” to—and this happened under the previous Government,—“We are going to pay you public money for public goods.” There is political consensus across the House that this is where we want to take this subsidy. It is about the fact that we probably should have published it five years ago, but the next best time is last week.

We can appreciate the frustration among farmers when one week they are told this, another week they are told that, and there does not seem to be this joined-up direction of travel. There is not a vision that seems to add up. I know that you are eventually going to produce a farming roadmap once you have produced all the other documents and somehow knit this all together, but it does not feel coherent. Can you understand that frustration?

Change is hard. One of the things I say is that no one has ever been sacked for doing nothing, so it is easy to just do status quo and have more claims on insurance and more crop failures.

Everybody wants to see Government set out a coherent vision on what is achievable if you want to produce more food in certain sectors and so on. Or are the Government saying, “No, take your land out of use and we will pay you to do it, that’s fine”? But as I say, one part of DEFRA is saying one thing, another is saying another, and here we are, 18 months in, and no one really has a clue what they should be doing.

I would disagree with that characterisation. We have a vision that is about using our land better; it is about continuing to enable farmers to grow the brilliant food that they grow, but stating clearly that climate change is real. There is a loss of the political consensus around that, which I bitterly regret. One of the strengths of this House was about passing the Climate Change Act. Having your party saying, “We pull out of it and we’re not going to do that” was a very regrettable position. The climate is changing. The farmers do not need Government to tell them that, because they can see it on their waterlogged fields and in their shrivelled crops. This is about how land will change, what you can do and what data you need to help you make that decision. There is a lot of good advice out there and there is going to be a simplification of the farming programme so that we will get more smaller farmers in—some of those farmers that are farming in the very marginal areas—to help them continue to remain on the land, but also get paid for the public goods that they are providing, as well as their traditional sheep farming, or whatever it is that they have been doing.

Thank you for setting out the land use framework. The strategic guidance you spoke of is brilliant. I represent Suffolk Coastal, which is on the coast. One of the big things I have always been trying to push for is a sea use framework. From my perspective the east coast of England is increasingly playing a bigger role in renewables and onshoring of renewables. Those two things and how we use that land have to connect with how we think of the sea, hence why there is a huge role for a sea use framework. What is the current thinking on that, and is that something I can continue to lobby for in the hope that the two might meet?

I definitely think you should always continue to lobby until you get what you want: that is my very strong advice, not an official DEFRA position. But you are right: there is this artificial construction about this division between land and sea, and this leads to areas of neglect. One of the areas of neglect is saltmarsh. We walked around that organic carrot farm in your constituency that is being converted into saltmarsh, on a very nice day out. It was lovely. We think of saltmarsh as something that needs to be drained and grazed, and you can graze on it. We do not talk about how it is a nursery for fish and a sponge for flood prevention, so we have not created or protected our saltmarsh. We have lost 85% of it. We have joined the International Salt Marsh Challenge. I am very passionate about saltmarshes because they are such neglected spaces, and they are those places between land and sea that you talk about. I am very keen to see it rolled out, particularly along the east of England because of the risks from tidal and spring tide flooding that the entire east coast of England and Scotland face, right the way up to Edinburgh. I can see what you are saying, but again, I am not the Water Minister or the flooding and coastal risk Minister, who has been very busy with the first water Bill, our plans for a second water Bill, the reform of the water sector and, of course, the £860 million that we have just announced for new flood defence schemes for 2026-27. But you are right about this: where does the land end? We have just launched our round Britain coastal path, of course. It is 2,750 miles in England and 6,800 miles with Wales and Scotland as well—the longest continuous waymarked route in the world, and it is going to be absolutely iconic. It was started under the last Labour Government in 2009 with the Marine and Coastal Access Act, carried on through the Coalition and Conservative Governments. It is such a massive achievement, and it is going to open up these coastal margins to more people, tourism, and farm opportunities for tourism. There are loads of farms that are running a bed and breakfast, a small business, or some caravans in the summer, and so on. Getting that coastal economy piece right is another important part of what we need to be thinking about.

I can entirely understand why having the data is useful and can inform decision making on how best to use land. My worry is that the biggest driver on what land will be used for is what will be most profitable. We are already seeing that, particularly with farming where, frankly, farmers can make more money from ground-mounted solar than they can from farming or, indeed, perfectly good environmentally rich areas being used for energy use. As it is not enforceable, is there not a risk that actually we are not looking at the best use of the land, but rather defaulting to what is the most profitable?

I want farmers to make a profit; that is how they sustain their businesses. The evidence from solar is that you can achieve biodiversity net gain of up to 300%, so it can be incredibly biodiversity-rich. On some farms, if the solar panels are at a particular angle, they also graze animals alongside and the livestock enjoy the shade and the richer grassland that is coming through the less intensive management of those fields. I know there is a visual amenity piece in terms of what people see that they might not like. They might like to see the green fields and not like to see the solar panels. That may change with some of the work we are announcing in terms of having local communities profiting from reduced energy bills. The Chancellor will be making a statement this afternoon about fuel and food prices and so on, and what we are doing to protect ourselves and create communities that are more resilient to shocks. On and offshore wind and solar all have a part to play in our national security and energy security story.

My second point was actually about the quality of ground-mounted solar. I have an application in my own constituency. It is 4,000 acres; a third of it will be on the best and most versatile, 20% on grade two agricultural land. The driver is profit. The rest of Europe has high quality ground-mounted solar—agriphotovoltaics—where it is much higher and there is grazing and agriculture underneath. Many of the solar farm applications in our country are poor quality. There is actually just the chance of grazing and the chance of biodiversity net gain. None of it is proven. We do not have long-established ground-mounted solar in this country; frankly I fear about greenwashing. Is there not an opportunity, through other policy decisions the Government can make, that we can enforce some of the environmental and agricultural benefits so that we are not lumped with poor quality ground-mounted solar and we are left behind compared with places such as Germany and Italy?

That is very interesting, because I can tell you it is equally controversial in Italy. We have had feed-in tariffs for solar. I remember asking the Library to show me where those feed-in tariffs had gone back in 2010, and I was astonished to see loads of solar in Worcestershire and all sorts of shire counties. I asked the librarian, “What is happening here?” They said, “It’s farms.” We have 16 years of experience of farming and solar. You make a strong argument about the quality of that, which is not something that has been raised with me; again, I am not the Energy Minister. But it is something that I can talk to colleagues about, and I am happy to liaise across Government about what good quality solar looks like, and what might be possible in the planning regime.

You are talking about updating agricultural land classification. If I quote you correctly, that “is going to safeguard our best, most versatile farmland from other uses.” To pick up the example there of ground-mounted solar, how is that actually going to work? Will it really help manage these trade-offs?

First, we have not updated the best and most versatile land classification for a couple of decades.

It is longer.

I don’t think it has been updated since 1987, so we are not even sure whether the data is right. We are going to publish that in 2028. It is unclear why it has taken 40 years to update this. Maybe it was something that no Government wanted to do; I genuinely do not know.

Land does not change much.

Unless it is underwater, baked dry, or it is peat that is losing a foot of soil every year—then it changes quite a lot. Maybe it does not change on the west, but we will see what the data says in two years’ time when we come back. I want to come back on the solar point. We have biodiversity net gain, and all planning permissions should now be with a 10% biodiversity net gain. There would be mandatory biodiversity net gain in your example of the 4,000 acres, Mr Jermy, and they would need to show how that was happening. That is already baked into the planning system thanks to the previous Government, and we are bringing it in for nationally significant infrastructure.

The land use framework is long-awaited and a great first step, but it is missing some of the implementation and delivery details, which we need to see urgently. It needs to be embedded in every aspect of spatial planning. I say that because Somerset council is currently developing its local plan, and the land use framework needs to be embedded within that. How is, or will, DEFRA work with local authorities to help implement the national framework into their local plans?

We have already covered quite a lot of that, so keep it tight.

It is a tool for them to use, as I said. It also needs to stack up with the local nature recovery strategy, some of which have been published, some of which have not. It is about giving planners those tools.

Moving on to questioning around nature protection and recovery.

As we know, environmental land management schemes and private finance are the two main vehicles that the Government can use to achieve their ambitious environmental targets. Opportunities to apply to take part in ELMS are currently very limited, particularly countryside stewardship and landscape recovery: that sort of higher ambition; and very few natural capital markets are available to access as well. Do you think that the rapid progress we need to make will be limited by that current restriction?

The farming programme is obviously open with rolling windows, and we are expecting SFI to see more progress on that in this year particularly. We recognise that some of the most ambitious nature programmes will be delivered through countryside stewardship higher tier, which has a round of applications going through at the moment, and particularly through our landscape recovery schemes, where we are starting to see implementation agreements in place for the first of those. There is a lot happening with our farming budget and, as the Minister said, the proportion of the farming budget that is spent on nature will be massively increased through the course of this Parliament. That is all carefully calibrated against the delivery plans and the environmental improvement plans. The environmental improvement plan sets out our interim targets, which plot an achievable pathway towards our statutory long-term targets for nature. Those take account of what we expect to be delivered particularly through our farming schemes, but other schemes such as private finance as well, that make a very significant contribution to our interim nature targets. We think those things are achievable according to the plans set out there, and with the budget that we secured in the spending review.

I appreciate that SFI is hopefully going to become more accessible and simplified, but I feel the barrier to entry for those higher tier schemes is still really high. Does the fact that it does not appear to be accessible for a small farmer, for example, not concern you?

We are looking at what it takes to engage. We know that some of our schemes in the past have been seen as being excessively complex. We know that farmers have often felt, for example, that they needed to buy in advice in order to participate in schemes. We are keen that SFI particularly, but also other schemes, are accessible to all farmers, and we continue to work on that to try to improve access. The latest wave of SFI is designed to be particularly accessible for small farmers and those who have not previously had an agreement with us. There will be a round that opens in June that is limited specifically to small farmers and those who have not previously had agreements, to try to prioritise those farmers in particular.

Just to press on landscape recovery, we spoke to Baroness Batters when she published her Farming Profitability Review, and one of the concerns that she has raised is that big landowners, both private and charitable, are hoovering up the vast majority of landscape recovery money. In some parts of the country we have seen tenant farmers being chucked off their land to allow for woodland creation, for example, without even being given the opportunity to talk about how their plans for their farming business could have adapted to sit alongside their landowners’ nature recovery plans. Surely, as a Labour Government in particular, we cannot be happy with that power imbalance.

We now have the first tenant farmer commissioner, George Dunn, for precisely those issues and, given that a third of farms—I think—are managed by tenants, it is absolutely vital. I remember fighting against the abolition of the Agricultural Workers Board back in 2010, and it is right that we, as a Labour Government, are listening to the people who are tenants. We want better rights for people who are renting their land. There are some brilliant, successful tenant farmers, but there are others who, as you say, have been poorly treated.

In some cases, sadly, it has been the National Trust doing that, and as a long-time National Trust member, I feel that is a real shame. We need to redress this imbalance because landscape recovery takes such a broad view that it should encompass all the people who are involved in that land as well.

I agree, and you want to do change with people rather than to people.

We have examples of landscape recovery schemes where large landowners are often taking the lead but are bringing together a partnership involving, in one case, 10 to 15 tenant farmers as part of that. We know that it is possible, and we want to make it easier.

To move on to natural capital markets, we know that more announcements are due soon; will that include an assessment of whether the action that the Department is taking will close this huge gap we have in green finance investment, which is currently estimated to be in the tens of billions?

We have to raise more money from the private sector on that. Internationally, we worked with France to set up the independent advisory panel on biodiversity credits; they were keen to learn some lessons from the carbon credit model that, again, saw communities chucked out of forests so that western Governments and businesses could say, “We’re doing our bit for nature” and forgetting the people element of things. There are a couple of clear principles that come out of that. First, we want to see companies doing it through their supply chains: insetting rather than offsetting their nature damage. So avoiding it in the first place rather than going in, chopping down, and then planting somewhere else. There needs to be a legal framework. That is incredibly important because it is no good doing one thing one year and then the law changes five years down the line: you need very strong policy and legal signals on all of this. You need to be doing this insetting in local areas with local people, and you need to be doing it over a 10 or 20-year period. So long, loud, local, and legal are the ways that we think about it. We have worked with the BSI to launch two nature investment standards. We are seen, historically and currently, as the standard setters for the world. If you think about TCFD and how that was developed through the work that Mark Carney did when he was Governor of the Bank of England and leading the G7, G20 into that to get it adopted. We are very keen to crowd in more private finance, to use blended finance, and to make sure that we have comfort that the policy environment is not going to change. We are actually doing a green investor roundtable in DEFRA this afternoon looking at some big investors: the pension funds. The problem is they want to invest £100 million and people might only need half a million pounds; there is no meso funding, there is macro and micro funding, but there is nothing in the middle. We have worked with small groups of farmers through our nature and environment investment readiness fund to say, “Are you ready for some investments, and how can we bring that capital to you?”—and act as a bit of a matchmaker.

On that point, one of the things that the land use framework talks about is blending public and private finance across Government, not just DEFRA. We know that can be particularly complicated. Are you clear on how that will be achieved in reality, and trying to lift that complexity burden that we have talked about?

Sorry, this is slightly jargony. We tend to phrase this as stacking: being able to bring different sources of finance on to one piece of land to deliver a range of outcomes, and we recognise that there is a lot of potential there. But it is complex and we need to make sure that it is transparent and that we are genuinely securing additionality so that we are not paying twice for the same outcome, or having two different providers buying the same outcome twice. We already know of examples where people are managing to stack biodiversity net gain with our environmental land management scheme: successfully, clearly, and transparently delivering more than one outcome from the same piece of land; so we know that it is possible. We are working with the BSI on getting the standards right for that to have a clear framework so that we can achieve it. It is a bit complicated at the moment; we are working to simplify it and are hoping to make some progress on that over the next year or so.

We have worked with the ISSB—International Sustainability Standards Board—which is the global standard setter. Once we get nature on to company accounts then it cannot be something that can just be traded away or forgotten about at that level. We have also hosted IPBES, which is essentially the IPCC for nature, for all of the world’s best scientists in Manchester in February—gosh, I cannot believe it was only in February; it feels like 1,000 years ago—basically talking about business impact and a very big report about what businesses need to do. We are going to publish a summary of responses to our call for evidence on how we increase private sector investment into nature, and hopefully that will be out before we rise on Thursday. It is about policy certainty, stability and high environmental integrity. People do not want to get caught and suddenly find it is greenwash. People want to know what they are investing in is the right thing. It is also about them having more resilient supply chains. We are going to pilot an agri-food pathway this year, and we are co-developing similar pathways for water and the built environment. We are working on that with WWF, the Green Finance Institute, the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, and other leading businesses: getting all the brains in the room and saying, “What do we need to do to make this happen?”

I just have a few questions that are a little more specific to constituencies such as mine. We know that the laws around protected sites are very complex and overlap a lot. For example, one piece of land can be covered by as many as five different designations. We also know that we are really far from where we need to be on protected sites being in favourable condition. How do we address that? Does the law need to be reformed, simplified, or how are you going to get us closer to where we need to be on all of that?

First, not all protected sites are equal. Through the environmental improvement plan we have a target of 50% of protected sites in recovering status or—what is it?

On track with actions.

It is the jargon I cannot do. On track with actions or on features that already have up-to-date assessment. We are trying to focus on the biggest and the most important targets. We can spend hours and hours and years and years going around looking at very small, niche things, when actually we want to do nature and landscape and recovery at scale; so we are going for the biggest and most important ones. I hope that gives you some comfort on that.

It does and it does not because Cannock Chase is the smallest national landscape in the country. We have some really rich, diverse habitats, which we as a Committee saw last week. I hope that if we are looking at certain habitats in the round, some of those benefits can come to our part of the world, even though we are geographically smaller. Just on Cannock Chase, obviously we are named and famed for our forest and stunning heathland as well, but it is also a working forest. Of course, we still have lots of timber plantations, given that the Forestry Commission is still the biggest single landowner on the Chase. It is fantastic that the environmental improvement plan commits to biodiversity on plantations on ancient woodland sites. This is also the first financial year that the Forestry Commission has been funded to carry out PAWS work, of course. As you would expect, attention is now turning to the coming years. Could you tell us whether the Forestry Commission will continue to be funded for that work, perhaps as part of the upcoming England trees action plan?

First, I want to get in that the UK forestry standard has changed: it has gone down from 75% pine to 65% usable softwood. That is important because we are the second largest timber importer in the world after China, so we need to grow more of our own wood. It is particularly useful for modular housing and for modular schools, and there is quite a good relationship between the Department for Education and our timber industry in terms of modular buildings, particularly for SEND. I visited a factory near me in Coventry that is making these. We need to improve and increase our timber supply, and if we are planting less timber we need to plant over a wider area. That is the maths. Forestry England has restored 20,000 hectares of plantations on ancient woodland over the last 10 years and that work continues. They have been dominated by these non-native tree species, but they have some features. You can see it in the soil, the seeds, through the ground flora or pre-plantation native trees. We have our target under the Environment Act to do 500,000 hectares by 2042, which we are doing through countryside stewardship. We are paying an additional revenue supplement for PAWS restoration to farmers. That is £275 per hectare on top of the standard revenue rate for woodland improvement of £127 per hectare over a 10-year agreement. That gives you that important first decade where the trees are getting established and where a certain percentage of them will die. We have grants for capital items for management including restoration activities, and we have supported 2,100 hectares of PAWS restoration over the last three years through that countryside stewardship grant. There are capital grants and revenue grants available for farmers under the countryside stewardship scheme.

The Environmental Audit Committee recently heard that ancient woodlands protect more biodiversity than pretty much any other landscape in the country. Looking through the lens of trying to get as much value for nature as possible, has DEFRA looked at the cost per hectare of PAWS work versus planting new woodland? The reason I ask is that previous answers from the Department to FOI requests seem to suggest that DEFRA does not hold figures on how much the Forestry Commission’s PAWS work is actually costing. That worries me, particularly when it comes to justifying spend for future years. If you do not know how much it is costing, how much benefit you are getting from each pound, then it is difficult to size that up against everything else that we have talked about in terms of nature restoration.

It would be hard to disaggregate it just because of the way that Forestry England works across different regions. Each region would need to report in what their PAWS restoration would be; so I can see that, to use the term, would incur disproportionate costs to work that out. But it is something I can go back and ask about, so we will try to get you an answer on that.

We will move on to the final part of this evidence session, in relation to land use and peat.

Peatland restoration is one of the goals that is set out in the various visions for the future contained with the land use framework. The Government want to restore 280,000 hectares of peatland by 2050. One of the ways DEFRA has sought to achieve this is through more restrictions on peat burning. This Committee raised concerns with Natural England about the data that supports these greater restrictions. Are you satisfied that the evidence base for these decisions has been rigorously scrutinised?

The short answer is yes; 80% of our peatlands are degraded. We have taken the action to introduce controls of burning and heather grassland in all uplands areas. As you would expect, this was after a consultation, and we have extremely good and rigorous science on this, so I am confident.

This is going to be done through re-wetting rather than controlled burning, so it is a cultural change for moorland managers to be able to do that. How will DEFRA and the land use framework support the transition?

You can control heather through mechanical means as well: you can cut it back. As I found out on my visit to the peatlands just outside Manchester, re-wetting does not actually prevent fires. We are seeing fires breaking out because of just these ridiculously hot, desiccating summers. But what the wetter peat gives you is more time to deal with it, should a fire break out. We have had some absolutely devastating fires, and I am thinking about the Stalybridge fire where all the children were off school for a week because of the incredible air pollution. They had mutual support coming in from Merseyside and the West Yorkshire Fire Service but you cannot have every fire service in the north of England fighting a peat fire for two weeks. We cannot externalise these costs on to the public purse any more, so this is very much about changing the way we think about these habitats.

I totally agree. As far as I am concerned, peat belongs in the bogs rather than being burnt and ending up in bags, which moves me on to my next question around peat extraction for gardening and growing. As we know, this directly contributes to the decline of peatlands and there is a knock-on impact for the interlinked nature and climate crisis. Somerset is one of only two places in England where peat extraction is still allowed to take place. In late 2024, as you will know, I put forward my Horticultural Peat (Prohibition of Sale) Bill; 95% of people are in favour of the Government taking action to ban retail peat sales. The Government are committed, as we know, to a peat ban within horticulture, but they still have not given a timeframe for delivery. If you do not get the parliamentary time to legislate for a ban, how will you achieve your goals for peatland restoration?

As you say, we have pledged to legislate. Our understanding is this requires primary legislation, so we would need to wait for a primary Bill slot to open up. We recognise the need for the horticulture sector to be able to have certainty on this issue to plan and to inform investment decisions and, of course, we have the great work that is being done by Kew at Wakehurst, the RHS and others on the brilliant work that they are doing on peat alternatives. Consumer understanding is low. You have to really know what you are looking for on the peat-free bags and the voluntary labelling that there is or is not on some bags. The peatlands policy is devolved, but we want to move together to achieve a ban working with the devolved Governments. I wrote to them last month confirming our commitment to a joined-up UK-wide—or GB-wide—approach. We will check whether it is UK or GB. There is an extra subtlety around Northern Ireland, of course, which is around if it is still legal to be sold in the Republic of Ireland then the TCA and the Windsor Framework means that it has to be able to be sold, so there is some complexity. But the commitment on the ban is embedded in our carbon budget planning so we have scored it, and it is also reflected in our environmental improvement plan. There are some nuances around UK and international trade, and we will have to manage that through the legislation.

This has obviously been going on for many years now, and there are a lot of businesses that I have spoken to that were in peat extraction, that are moving and have moved to peat-free. But there is a huge amount of frustration, is there not, as the legislation is not in place? We need to really start to embed that support for horticultural businesses. Most of them are small or medium-sized enterprises that have to push and have the tools that they need to be able to go peat-free, and there needs to be parity in the industry to achieve that successful peat-free future. How will DEFRA work with those horticultural businesses to ensure the regulation, when it comes—and it needs to—is workable and can be properly implemented?

I am sure we will do a consultation on it and, as with any consultation, we will take into account the views of all stakeholders. We want laws that work, not laws that are not going to work, are going to be flouted, or where there are loopholes. We will do the consultation, as I say, there will be drafting, it will go through the House in the normal way and, should there be any imperfections, there will be the chance for Members to amend as it goes through both Houses.

You mentioned the risk of offshoring. Do you accept that demand from UK horticulture is driving peat extraction in other countries? You mentioned Scotland and Northern Ireland, but there is also mainland Europe. Could you take into account the offshored carbon emissions that are accrued by demand in your calculations around the carbon savings and the climate resilience, and how that benefits the ending of peat sales? Has a future ban on peat imports been addressed in the current UK-EU SPS negotiations?

I understand it is mostly the Netherlands where the imported peat comes from; it also has tonnes of lowland peat. It obviously has a huge horticultural industry. On the carbon budgets, we do not know the answer to that.

We can come back to you on whether offshored peat is included in our carbon budget calculations.

I doubt it is included. I am trying to find my EU reset bit in this very large pack, but I cannot see it on any of these pages.

We don’t think there is any barrier through the EU reset process to our domestic ban on sales.

No barrier has yet emerged.

Just to dwell on heather burning for a second, it sounds to me like you see no role for controlled burning in moorland management.

Not on 30 cm peat, no.

The people who turn out to help the fire brigades are people who are gamekeepers and upland farmers, the people you are going to be managing out of these areas. Who will fight the fires in the future?

We are not going to be managing them out at all. We want them to be there managing the peatlands, re-wetting the peatlands and being paid for the cleaner water and the flood prevention services that they are providing.

But not producing food?

Yes, they still can.

They still can? Let me put it like this to you, Mary. Is it not about time that the Government levelled with these communities about how you really see the future for them? Because all the indications are that you see the upland farms and communities as communities who are going to have to change. But nobody is telling them that.

We have farmers who can see, from what is happening on their land, that things are changing. They know that change is not just coming in the future but is happening now.

But you are talking about the arable farmers and their two bad harvests; the people who are going to have to change are the sheep and beef farmers in the uplands.

Everyone is going to have to change. The challenge of change is coming to all industries. The challenge of climate change is already changing how we do things in this country. If I knew what was coming I would go out and tell them, but the problem is that nobody can predict the future. We can make a best scientific guess, but that does not mean that it will not be contested, that there will not be bad faith actors who will challenge the basic principles on which we are working, and that there will not be years when things do or do not happen that will lead people to say, “Well, that didn’t happen this year, so the Government are wrong.” It is not for Government to predict the future; it is about giving people the tools they need to manage their businesses in a changing climate.

We will no doubt come back to this, but we will now move on to the next session.