Clarity on ELMS needed in new year to keep farmers on board
“YOU don’t buy something from the shop without knowing the price.”
It’s a simple message, but one well made by Mark Tufnell, president of the Country, Land and Business Association, when addressing recently-appointed Environment Secretary Therese Coffey on the position facing farmers awaiting details of new post-Brexit funding support schemes.
“And you don’t as a farmer,” he added, “enter into a new environmental scheme without knowing whether it’d be worth it for your business.”
For too long farmers have been left in the dark about the exact rewards of the evolving Environmental Land
Management Scheme (ELMS), which replaces the old EU Basic Payment Scheme, where subsidies were mostly on the basis of the amount of land farmed.
Those BPS payments are already being cut, but the replacement for the European Union regime has been slow to take shape.
Clarity is something farmers have been crying out for, with the need highlighted in the WMN on repeated occasions.
Without that, farmers are unlikely to rush to embrace the changes proposed.
Just as clarity seemed to be close at hand, the whole scheme was suddenly plunged into uncertainty at the eleventh hour under the leadership of Liz Truss. During her brief and ill-fated premiership she sacked well regarded Defra Secretary and Cornish MP George Eustice and called for a review of ELMS.
Mr Tufnell said the Country, Land and Business Association had long supported the idea of payments for environmental delivery alongside food production, but warned it was “getting very difficult to sell this proposition”.
In his speech at the CLA’s rural business conference in London yesterday, he rightly said it was “unacceptable” that payment rates for the sustainable farming initiative and the “Countryside Stewardship plus” programme had not yet been published.
How indeed can farmers, whose business planning is measured in years rather than months, get on board if they don’t know what they are signing up for?
So it is heartening that Ms Coffey reassured the conference that not only was the review complete, but that further details would be announced early in the new year.
They can’t come soon enough for our farming community.
“I am committed to giving you the clarity, certainty and support that I know you need,” she said. “So early in the new year we will be saying more about what we’ll be offering to pay you to do in the next phase of all the schemes.” Knowing that farmers awaiting the incoming scheme are seeing their former BPS payments cut, she added: “All the funding that we are taking out of reductions in BPS over time will continue to be made available to farmers, through a combination of one-off grants and ongoing schemes and the advice you need to get your business on the right footing for the future.”
It is to be hoped that the ambitions of ELMS will be realised, providing for farmers, ensuring sufficient food production and enhancing the environment. A degree of urgency is now desperately needed in Whitehall.