Gove pledges to continue farm subsidies until 2024

Payments will focus on environmental benefits after Brexit

Westminster has guaranteed direct support for British farming until 2024 – two years longer than was previously promised.

However, the commitment comes with conditions, and payments to the largest recipients of funds will be capped in England – a policy that is also likely to be adopted in Scotland.

In a speech to the Oxford Farming Conference, Defra Secretary Michael Gove outlined the Government’s vision for future British farming which includes financial support for “public goods” such as creating new habitats for wildlife, improving water quality and returning cultivated land to wildflower meadows.

He told an audience of 500 farmers and industry leaders that agriculture needed time to transition from operating under what he described as an “unjust and inefficient” Common Agricultural Policy to a new British policy which would focus on paying for public goods that the market does not provide.

He outlined a four-point plan for change which will be fleshed out in a White Paper later this year and includes giving farmers the tools to support new technology, skills and infrastructure to prepare them for the changes which are coming.

Mr Gove also outlined his vision for a “coherent” food policy that will integrate farming, consumers, public health and the environment, and he proposed a new overarching approach to food labelling and creating a “gold-standard metric” for food and farming quality.

“There’s no single, scaled measure of how a farmer or food producer performs against a sensible basket of indicators, taking into account such things as soil health, control of pollution, contribution to water quality as well as animal welfare,” he said.

“We’ve been in discussion with a number of farmers and food producers about how we might advance such a scheme and I think that, outside the EU, we could establish a measure of farm and food quality which would be world-leading.”

nnicolson@thecourier.co.uk

Picture: PA. Defra Secretary Michael Gove at the conference.