Axe falls on taxpayer subsidies to farmers
SubSidieS for farmers are being axed in a post-brexit shake-up of british agriculture.
in the biggest change to farming in more than 50 years, they will be phased out and replaced with payments to protect the environment.
environment Secretary George eustice will spell out today how subsidies will be cut from next year and will be gone by 2028.
The National Farmers’ union warned last night that it was a ‘high-risk’ strategy.
until 2024, the Government will maintain the £2.4billion paid to the uK in eu agriculture subsidies, but will halve the £1.8billion handed out in direct payments to farmers.
The £900million saved will go towards a new environmental Land Management scheme (elm) to reward farmers for sustainable farming practices, creating habitats and rewilding land.
Separately, a farming investment fund will offer grants for equipment and technology such as robots and infrastructure including water storage.
A resilience programme will help those most affected by the loss of direct payments to help them manage their businesses.
in a speech to farmers and environmental groups today, Mr eustice is expected to say: ‘We want farmers to access public money to help their businesses become more productive and sustainable, whilst taking steps to improve the environment and animal welfare, and deliver climate change outcomes on the land they manage.
‘Rather than the prescriptive, top-down rules of the eu, we want to support the choices farmers and land managers take. if we work together to get this right, a decade from now the rest of the world will want to follow our lead.’
The elm scheme will have three strands. The first is a sustainable f arming i ncentive to support measures such as improving soil health and hedgerows and reducing pesticides.
The second, local nature recovery, will fund activity such as creating, managing or restoring habitat, managing floods using natural features and boosting wild species.
Thirdly, there will be landscape recovery projects to finance largescale woodland creation, peatland restoration, or the creation or restoration of coastal habitats such as wetlands and salt marsh.
Rewilding projects that restore natural processes to large areas of land could be funded under the third strand. Officials want a more flexible environmental scheme overall than the eu’s Common Agricultural Policy allows.
NFu president Minette batters said: ‘expecting farmers to run viable, high-cost businesses, produce food and increase their environmental delivery, while phasing out existing support and without a complete replacement scheme for almost three years is high risk and a very big ask. Ministers must bear these challenges in mind.’