The New Land Use Framework for England explained

Hello.

0:05

Welcome to Farmgate. I'm Finlow Costain, the editor of 8.9.com the UK government has just published England's first ever land use framework. Environment Secretary Emma Reynolds said, our land is a vital national asset, but it's finite. We cannot be held back by the false choices between building homes and producing food, restoring nature and supporting farmers, or delivering clean energy and protecting landscapes. Government's new framework, she says, gives decision makers a single shared vision for how we can play to the strengths of our diverse landscapes. To discuss the framework, I'm joined by the Chief Executive of the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission, Sue Pritchard, and by the Chief Executive of the National Sheep association and Chair of the Dartmoor Land Use Management Group, Phil Stocker. Welcome both. Sue, you have long advocated for a land use framework. You must be pretty pleased this morning.

0:05

Yes, I am, Finlow. It was quite the moment yesterday in London. We'll talk about the content of it in a minute. But what really, really struck me was two things. First of all, on the panel announcing the framework with three ministers, Secretary of State and her two ministers, and the permsac, that's a big demonstration of leadership and commitment from the department behind was backed by two other Secretaries of State, Steve Reed, MHCLG and Ed Miliband at Desnes. And even though the launch was slightly delayed from last week when some of us were expecting it, there was a big turnout. There were a lot of people who had kind of shifted their diaries at the last minute to be there for the moment, from rights across sectors and interest groups, campaigners and civil servants and leaders. So it really felt like a moment and I think recognized how many people, how many organizations, how many folk have been kind of working to bring this to fruition for a long time now. So, yes, yes, I am pleased.

0:58

Just sort of pushing back on that slightly. Of course, the government has been criticized time and again, really, over the course of the last 18 months or so, for its failure to deliver leadership, particularly in this area. And I wonder if you felt that yesterday really was genuinely a watershed moment, that this is the start of the government putting its feet into the field, onto the ground, and saying, this is what we're about, this is where we're going.

2:19

Well, certainly, yes. I mean, I'm not quite so sure that government hasn't been doing anything in the last 18 months. I know that's quite a common narrative, but behind the scenes, and where I've been working with government, they have been putting lots of building blocks in place. The land Use framework is but one of the strategic projects that DEFRA has been working on. They are also working on food strategy, they're also working on the farming roadmap. We'll talk about that shortly too. But in desnes, the agri food sector pathway to decarbonize food systems is also underway. So there's a lot going on behind the scenes. And what is going on is trying to be as inclusive as possible. But granted, there have been some big missteps too, big communication missteps as well as strategy missteps. But I think there's a lot to like in this moment.

2:44

Yeah, yeah, great. And it wasn't really to sort of push back insofar as, you know, to say that the government hasn't been working. It was more about actually presenting and getting that narrative out there. And it felt like this is, you know, a chink of light that the door is starting to open. And as you say, we've got these other frameworks, these other policies that are due out later in the year. So what's the purpose of land use framework? Why is it important?

3:41

Well, as many people have been saying for some time, we have to talk about land. Land is central to so many critical issues that the UK is facing, actually the whole world is facing, but it's been quite difficult to do that in the UK for all sorts of reasons. But just in preparation for yesterday, I was looking back at some what you might call historic documents from the 90s and the noughties and the decades of foresight paper in 2010 about the importance of land was really, really critical. But it being kind of kicked into the long grass, into the too hard box for quite some time, because whilst people recognized that land was central, there was no mechanism for leaning into the difficult decisions that we were going to have to make. So this land use framework isn't about land and land use, it's about land use decision making processes. It's about tackling some of the blocks to good decision making. The silos in government, the gaps between national and local, the fact that for some really critical areas like food production, there are no targets. So it often feels like the poor relation. And so this, this is a way of bringing together in a really coherent way both the issues, the strategic issues, the strategic priorities and the mechanisms for starting to make decisions about how the nation makes really good use of land to help us deliver our national priorities.

4:03

Now, the framework is 50 pages long and we can't go into every bit of it, but part of it, of course, is that you know, as you say, there is a sort of a strategic direction which perhaps has been lacking for, you know, for decades, around land use. And I just wonder if you could talk us through the core principles behind the framework, because they obviously are the foundation stone.

5:39

There is an important chapter on the government's vision for land, which is worth a read because it starts signaling those connections to other department priorities. But the principles embedded in this land use framework, I think are really, really interesting and build a lot on the work that we've done at FFCC over the last seven or eight years. So there are four principles that I think are really important. The first, which many of us have been talking about for some time, is a principle of multi functionality, that land can be used for more than one thing. Now, for those of us who live near the land, close to the land, on the land, we know land is inherently multifunctional. Land does lots of things all at the same time. But in policy terms, that's quite the radical piece because policy and indeed the academy are used to thinking in quite narrow issues. So to be really explicit about the importance of, of multifunctionality planning for land to be able to do more than one thing at any given time, restoring nature and producing food, producing energy and tackling flood risk, improving water quality and providing a beautiful environment for us, for health and well being, land can do more than one thing at a time. And that principle is embedded. The second is about right use, right place, and that's about the connection between strategy and local context. This is a really important recognition that, you know, big strategies, big national strategies, big, big principles will only be delivered in the kind of white heat of context and conditions at any particular place. So it's a really good recognition that any strategy only becomes real in the context of delivery on the ground. It recognizes too the principle that any land use needs to be capable of adaptation. When we talk about future scenarios, the reality is that we can predict some, but we can't predict others. So whatever we decide to do on land has to be capable of adaptation and resilience for any future scenarios. Things like flood risks, things like sea level rises, things like the capacity to grow food on land that is also at huge flood risk, we need to be managing and designing for a much more adaptive future. So that's the third of the key principles. And the fourth principle is about using evidence for future ready decisions. It illustrates, it describes how really critical data sets are often held in very different departments or places. And it means that people who need to make decisions on the ground are having to rely on either data that's partial or data that's expensive or difficult to access. It's really difficult to make decisions without really good quality and holistic data sets. So the last principle is about future ready decisions based on really good quality data and evidence. Those four principles I think set out a really good grounding for helping to bring people together with those principles at the heart of a process to start to work through what this is going to mean in any given place or time.

6:02

Yeah, fantastic. Thanks so much for that. I find we're going to talk about multifunctionality a little bit more a bit later in the program. But the other thing that I find, you know, really interesting there is that adaptation element, the adaptivity. Because if you sort of look over the last couple of decades, even then there has been so much change out in the world, in the nation, in the world, in terms of the way that we think and the way that the environment is behaving, then clearly going forward that's going to be a big issue. And of course, I guess this is going to again, maybe come to this a bit later. But how this fits with food policies, how this fits with food strategies is going to be interesting because probably our food system is seriously unadaptable at the moment. It's sort of stuck in a very sort of top down model with the retail system that we have. And so finding ways of delivering that adaptivity at ground level and throughout the food system is going to be a really interesting challenge. Phil, is this good news for farmers generally?

9:32

Well, this has been long awaited and I think for those that have in a way kept pace with what's going on, I think people will see it as good news because I think it is again, a marker about where we're going and about the way forward. Having said that, you know, there's going to be a lot of individual farmers out there at the moment. They probably don't think that this is good news. They don't understand it, and they probably will be thinking again, this is a government taking control of decisions over what they do with their land. And the way that sue has very eloquently outlined the framework, this is very much a national ambition, I guess, and what we've got to do. And it's absolutely right that we look at this on a national scale. As sue said, there's all sorts of demands, be them access or planning demands or nature demands, climate demands and food production demands, all sorts of demands on our land. And I suppose this is A national ambition that will have an individual impact. And I suppose the challenge now is actually supporting and carrying farmers through that change so that decisions that they make, encouraged by government and DEFRA policy, are supported in a way that those farms and businesses can be viable. And I think the whole concept of a land use framework, deciding the best use for land is something that farmers have always done forever. You know, we've all got areas of land that we know are more productive areas of land that we think, you know, you could set aside for rewetting or plant some trees or. And, you know, we've all got areas of land that we think, well, we could put some solar panels there or a wind turbine or. Or maybe build a house or whatever it might be, or do something for tourism or accommodation. So I suppose on an individual, individual farm basis, people have been doing their own land use frameworking for some time, and I suppose this now sets a framework for how we look at this in a more strategic way, taking into account some of those really global challenges that you've already talked about, those huge global challenges around food security and managing the climate and storing carbon and doing what we can to aid nature recovery as well. All those things need to come together and is absolutely right that we do this. As I say, I think the big. The challenge, I guess, and the thing that most farmers will be nervous about if they are encouraged to change the way that they make use of their land, that there are viable options for them to go forward.

10:32

Yeah, it's interesting the way that you talk about the way in which every farmer has had a degree. You know, they had a framework, they've had a plan for their own farmer. But this is about sort of trying to understand that plan within this national context, but at different levels of governance, isn't it? So it's. How does. How does what you're doing on your farm fit with your village, with your local authority, with your region, with the nation as well, and trying to get some clarity and direction on those things together in order that we're able to have more forests, because we need more forests in order that we're able to have, you know, good food in the right places, that nature is able to regenerate as well. So it's. It's combining all of these things. And I guess, Phil, there's a degree to which having any policy set out is a good thing. When, you know, as I say, whether it's quite accurate or not, there has been this sense of government blowing in the wind a little bit, not being Quite sure exactly what these priorities are. They seem to change. Different governments obviously have different priorities. They seem to change a little bit, kind of year to year, almost month to month at times. But here there is some clarity and. And no matter where you are, within that clear picture, at least now you know vaguely what it is and start planning.

13:06

I agree wholly. And I think, you know, I've said for a long time that the industry as a whole, I suppose the country is still lacking a detailed vision of where we're going. Now, if you're involved in this sort of work, like sue and I and you and many others are, you know, I think you see what's going on behind the scenes. And, you know, I agree with sue that, you know, the government have not been doing nothing for the last 18 months. They've been busy, really, but there's been a communication vacuum and we've not managed to take people on that journey of where we're going. But if you look back to the foresight report, was that 2010, 2011, and then you look back to, you know, Michael Gove's Health and Harmony report a little bit later, when was that? 2017, 18, something like that. Somewhere in that order, you know, there's a really clear trajectory about where we're going. And it is this thing about the global population is still growing, our Earth's resources are finite and they're getting scarcer. And I suppose with all the global disruption going on at the moment, our ability to be able to access those resources is getting more challenged as well. And we've got this climate change and nature problem that we've got emergency that we've got to tackle as well. So we've got to find ways of bringing that together. I think that the Michael Gove's Health and Harmony report set out a really clear overall direction of where we're going and where we. Where I guess it ground to a little bit of a halt. Then there's so many things where people were busy working away in silos, not managing to connect stuff together. But I think if you can step above that, we are all. We are going in a direction. And, you know, sue mentioned the land Use framework, which was launched yesterday. We've got the farming roadmap, which is coming out shortly. We've got all of our climate commitments, we've got our nature commitments. You know, earlier this year in January, the government came out with its new animal welfare strategy as well. And there's years since then we've had in our sector and the sheep sector, too. Consultations following on rapidly from that around, you know, how we manage operations in lambs, and now mandatory vet visits, you know, so this is all starting to come together. And again, I think the one thing that we're still struggling to. The last piece of the jigsaw, a really important piece of the jigsaw, I guess, that is still missing, is effective support to be able to carry those farmers through, I suppose, to get them to sign up to this journey as to where we're going, but effective support so that they've got the confidence that they can do this and not challenge their own viability.

14:19

Yeah, I agree with you that the Health and Harmony report really was an exciting vision for the way that land could be used. The trouble was that it then kind of started to fall apart when Gove sort of moved on in the mechanisms. It was, how was the policy going to be developed? How was it going to be set out? What was farmer's role in delivering this? And of course, what we've had here is the beginnings of a vision, the couple of pages of Emma Reynolds setting out her vision for agriculture and land use more generally. At the same time, there are mechanisms in place to start delivering this. So it's that combination of vision and mechanism which is so important. But just turning to sheep farming in particular, the uplands are set out as less productive land within the strategy. Does this mean that. That land. That sheep farmers become more vulnerable to other priorities as a result?

16:56

I think we've been seeing that for some time, to be honest. We've seen our sheep numbers in the UK fall by somewhere between 3, 4, 5% a year over the last three or four years, I suppose, and it's difficult to get the facts behind some of that data from the people. From what I know, from what I see and the people I talk to, where we're seeing that fall in sheep numbers is in the upland areas. You know, if anything, we're seeing an expansion in lowland Britain as we see a reintroduction of grass within arable areas, which, again, is a great thing, the reintroduction of mixed farming in some of our arable areas. But we are seeing a reduction in those upland areas. To me, this all comes down again to multifunctionality, which is the word that's used, you know, recognized in the. In the land use frameworks as well. Recognizing that multifunctionality that we can get sheep farming systems, and I would say livestock farmer systems, to work in harmony with delivering a host of public benefits. Again, the thing that is still missing is that clarity over the financial reward for the delivery of those environmental goods. And we know that public finances are tight, we know that they're probably going to remain tight. We also, within ourselves sector would probably all agree that there is an inadequate recognition of the breadth and the value of all the public goods that we are delivering. There's an expectation that we're going to move towards green finance models and private finance coming in. And again, that's there, but it's still not certain and it's still not available in a way that your average family farmer can get access to it. Although again, within the land use framework, you know, there's this £30 million that's been put towards collaboration and that would be a great model to bring farmers together to work out how collectively you could put portfolios of delivery of public goods together to be able to draw down that finance model. So again, but you said finlo at the start of this, there is so much change going on and carrying those small micro businesses through that change when they're frantically on a day to day basis, flat out working, doing the jobs that they've got to do to get their heads around all this policy change and structural change is really, really difficult, I would say. It's hard for us working in this sector to keep tracks on what's going on. For those people that are farming flat out on a daily basis, it's impossible to keep their heads around what the change that's going on.

17:46

Yeah, it's really interesting to hear you sort of reflecting on that. And of course within the uplands, as you say, there is a recognition, there has been a general trend towards away intensity in terms of sheep, I suppose, and towards more delivery of natural capital. But it is about getting those financial and market mechanisms in place so that people can earn a living.

20:23

Yeah, absolutely. Do you know that you've raised an interesting phrase there too because you talked about them moving away from that intensity of livestock farming. You know, I think in my lifetime, over this last three, four decades or so, I've seen a move in the uplands towards extensification. And I can remember 20 years ago a meeting in Aberystwy saying there's a real risk of the way that we're going with extension our uplands, we're going to end up with ranching our livestock, with inadequate management on our livestock and sadly I feel that's exactly where we are. And while we often talk about intensive farming being bad or not very good, and we talk about extensive farming being good, I think what we need is more intensity in our farming systems and our food production and our management. Even in the uplands, we need more intensity of management rather than intensive farming systems. If, you know, we've almost pushed our farming systems to a scale where they're a large scale that rely on inadequate labor, too little labor, people are rushing around all over the place trying to do far too much, and we're not getting the opportunity and it's just not viable to be able to manage them in the way that we probably all know we should be.

20:44

Yeah, it's interesting because we've spoken about this before, haven't we? The idea of whether extensification or intensification is the best approach, but really it's about the right flock in the right place being managed in the right way, isn't it? And if you've simply got a flock that's left, set stocking, that's cropping that land really, really low, then that's not delivering any decent ecological advantages. Whereas if you have that heavy impact that's associated, I suppose, suppose more often with cattle with mob grazing, where there is some active shepherding going on, then you can have some really seriously good outcomes as well. And I guess part of that market strategy, getting market mechanisms, financial mechanisms in, is around things like biodiversity net gain. Because although there is an emphasis within the Landius framework on private money coming in, there is a need for frameworks, again from government, which are consistent frameworks enable that money to come into the right places. And there has been this sort of vacillation in terms of policy, or again, apparent vacillation in terms of bng, whether the government is committed to it, whether they're not committed to it. It hasn't been quite clear over the last few years. And yet this is a big opportunity to get money, as development takes place in other places, to get money into farming to support people like we're talking about the shepherd that we're talking about.

21:58

Yeah, I know. And I think to date, you know, most of the biodiversity net gain and the carbon credits that have been available have almost come. They've been made available at the expense of farming or not delivered to areas that are involved in active farming. It's almost instead of farming. And I think maybe we're just approaching a time now where we can pull together evidence and a level of engagement, I suppose that can demonstrate that actually through the right farming approaches that are truly multifunctional and are truly delivering high quality public goods, they are deserving of private money, biodiversity net gain and carbon credits and all the like, you know, I think it is a challenge that we've got now. There's so much of a thing, so many of the things that we're setting out, I guess, are underpinned by evidence. And I would still say there's a lot of science and evidence that is incomplete. And science never surely gets to a point where we've learned everything and we stop. We have to keep going, don't we, really, and keep testing and challenging and trying to find out new approaches.

23:21

Yeah, it's the continuing to learn, which is sometimes a challenge. I think often people sort of get to a point where they think they know everything they need to know in their particular area and then they stop learning. So it's about making sure that research process, but that learning process continues within academia, within government, within society as well. Now, sue, we were talking, Phil and I, there, about the idea a little while back about, you know, individual farms having their own plans and their own frameworks, and how this then links to the parish and the. The region and to the nation as a whole. So how will the framework priorities be assessed at local and regional level? And what sort of difference is it all going to make in terms of actual planning processes up on the.

24:25

On the money conversation that you guys were just having there first before I do, because I think it is. It is really, really important and it features explicitly in. In the government's publication as you two. There are all sorts of pockets of finance resources currently available, but it feels a bit patchy and a bit underdone and not necessarily delivering the government's outcomes or the outcomes that we all want. And I think the framework starts to set out the process by which we can map out where all of the resources are. Where is all of the money working at the moment, not just in DEFRA and in farm payments or in biodiversity net G gain, or in the private sector through natural capital payments, but also in water companies and energy companies and so on. If we're much clearer about where all of the resources are within government, in the private sector, already being deployed at a regional level through councils and others, and if we can map all of those resources with a clear sense of the public value that is being derived from them, not just, you know, how people are kind of maxing out private returns, their private interests, which they're able to do at the minute, then we get a much more coherent, much more aligned relationship between the resources and the strategy and the outcomes. So there's a. There's a piece in here and it's kind of, you know, it's actually quite a short, it's a short framework. There's, you know, not much more than 50 pages and there's a lot of material going on on the click throughs and behind the scenes here. But mapping the resources, mapping the finance and making sure that the resources align with the public interest, the public value is a really key component of this. And of course that's the part that engages and excites Treasury. And once we have treasury excited about land use frameworks, about how we make better decisions about land, then we know we've got got some serious leadership lining up in government behind some of the tricky things that we've got to do. But coming on to the relationship between the national and the local, one of my favourite diagrams in the, in the framework actually describes that quite explicitly and it describes it as, I mean this is going to sound quite policy wonky, so I apologise for that. But it's a kind of dynamic relationship between what goes on nationally, but also what, what's already happening locally. As Phil said, farmers are kind of already doing this in landscape recovery projects, in farmer clusters. Forward thinking farmers are seeing exactly the same metrics, the same evidence that we're all seeing about geopolitics, about climate change, about nature, and they're already doing stuff to respond to it. The mechanism for aligning what needs to happen in a place and what needs to happen nationally. The national conditions, if you like, the strategy and the conditions that government policy can create, that only government policy can create, is delivered through what is a kind of conversation, a relationship between top down and bottom up, where in the framework government identifies the mayors as having serious responsibility. So kind of larger than local. But in lots of parts of places we know already that counties are already doing this work. The larger county councils are already leading this work. We've worked closely with adept, the local authority, Organization of Environment Planning and Transport directors because they're also having to do this work already. It's not as if the problems have been sitting quietly waiting for government to finish thinking about, about this stuff. People have been doing the work for ages and those local authorities, mayoralties, regions have also been calling on government to set a coherent, aligned and strategic process so that they're all clear about what the broad direction of travel is and what they need to do in places at different scales, depending on the problem they're trying to solve here. So I think one of the reasons that we're really attached to the idea of principles rather than a plan is this kind of work can only ever be delivered in place on the ground, with a really deep and profound and serious understanding of how the geography, how the context, how the ecology of a place works for the problem that you're trying to solve. If you're talking about flooding, you're talking about a whole catchment, a river catchment area. If you're talking about energy, you're trying to work out where the infrastructure works. If you're talking about housing, you really don't want to be building, you know, houses on floodplains. And if you're talking about food production, you really need to grow food in places that are ecologically suited for that. We can stop growing maize on steep slopes, for example, so. So the delivery is deeply and intimately connected with local ecology. And I think the framework recognizes and acknowledges that and starts to set out the different levels and spatial scales where these different challenges are going to get resolved.

25:05

It's interesting, actually, as you sort of talk about that, I'm thinking of one of the examples that I personally was quite pleased to see within the framework, which was a description of what rivers would look like in 2050 and the way in which watercourses would have woodland around them, big buffers, new woodland growing up to protect those rivers, to deliver the nature benefit, but also to sort of help with nutrient runoff and a range of different things. So you start to see through some of these examples the way that the government is envisioning the land use in the future. And of course, that's the kind of thing that we've been talking about for a long time. But having that at a national strategic scale would be rather fantastic. So many farmers will, of course, welcome the fact that multifunctionality of land use is being prioritized here. We touched on this before as one of the key principles. The NFU has said that it's pleased to see a commitment to maintaining current levels of food production. Do you think that the framework will actually make it easier to deliver things like agroforestry? And I'm thinking here about conversations that farmers are having with Natural England, where they're not allowed to plant trees here or there or whatever. Is it going to make it easier to have those conversations and to stack natural capital delivery with ongoing agricultural land use? Because that stacking of enterprise is going to be so important?

30:50

Yeah, I think it is. There are some paragraphs in the framework that indicate how the RPA can use data much more sensitively and appropriately and help farmers plan their businesses and their landscapes, their farm enterprises, in a way that will generate appropriate financial rewards. Again, it's a really interesting tension, isn't it, between what we know already happens on land and landscapes and how policy kind of construes it in really narrow, siloed ways. There are lots of farmers who are already letting their hedgerows grow out, who are, you know, planting more trees on the less productive elements of their land, who are creating habitat corridors to bring in integrated pest management instead of chemicals onto their. Onto their landscapes. So for thoughtful farmers who are thinking hard about how they can strengthen their enterprise, how they can make their enterprise more resilient, they're already doing this. And I like to think that some of the policy shifts and some of what we're seeing in the land use framework has arisen from policymakers and politicians actually seeing what's possible on farms, what farms are already doing. So they've been seeing silver pasture in action, they've been seeing chickens in woods, they've been seeing agroforestry and cropping between. Between the agroforestry terraces. So they've been seeing how this can work in practice. And for all of those farmers who've put their own money where their mouth is and said, look, government, this might be difficult for you to conceptualize in Whitehall, but if you come and look and see what this looks and feels like on the ground, in places, in landscapes, it's going to give you more confidence about what you can plan for. So I think that's been really, really powerful. And hats off to those innovative farmers who've really been demonstrating what's possible in collaborating in clusters, in landscape recovery schemes, all of those farming advisors who've been supporting farmers to bring nature onto their land, land the flags of this world. And, you know, the Royal Countryside Fund, there have been lots and lots of folk who've been doing this work quietly and persistently on the ground for ages. And that innovation, I think, has given government real confidence to back it in a framework like this. So it's. It's a kind of. It's a virtuous circle, isn't it, of showing and telling.

32:15

Okay, this works well, one hopes that it will be. And I'm just gonna, again, I'm just gonna sort of frame the question slightly differently, I suppose, and just push back a little bit because, you know, you talk about some of the examples of excellence that are out there, the innovators that are working on silvopaste, the fuags of this world, et cetera, but then it comes down to sort of almost relationships with individual People within bureaucracies, it comes down to specific interpretations of regulation. So I guess the question is, to an extent, how well people are going to be trained in the Land Use Framework throughout these agencies. And I'm thinking of Peter Craven, the head of agriculture at Natural England, who came onto the podcast a couple of months ago talking about Natural England's new strategy, where they are actively wanting, they're recognizing some of the challenges of the past, wanting to more actively engage with farmers and learn with farmers in that way. But it comes back to that point that Phil was making about, you know, having to keep learning, keep learning, keep learning, but at the same time being able to work within the mechanisms and the structures. So I guess it's how the Land Use Framework works with existing regulation helps Natural England, for example, to work through its own updated strategy. But it comes down really to the individuals who are actually going out and meeting the farmers and signing off forms.

35:10

Yeah. So again, within the Framework, government has said it will set up a land use delivery unit who will be able to work across government and between government and the local, regional. So who, who staffs that is going to be key and how we work with that unit is going to be key, how we make sure that they do feel well informed, not, not just on the technical details, but on the processes that work. There's no point inviting lot farmers into kind of technical training sessions. Most farmers learn from other farmers and they learn from a conversation on the farm gate or in the market, and they learn through seeing and doing. And when we're much clearer, I think, and much more proactive in thinking about the relationship between strategy and delivery on the ground, knowing what works in getting stuff done in places, then we're going to be able to move fast and.

36:30

Yeah, yeah. And actually, as you talk, I'm reminded of a section within the Framework document that was always sort of looking at a slightly less risk averse sort of future going forward. It was talking about agroforestry, I think, and the idea that farmers could try something without being worried that if they had planted trees, they wouldn't be able to get rid of them if it didn't work. And so being able to take some of those risks, try things out bit more, would be very welcome. Look, Phil, we've been talking, you know, at a kind of national scale or theoretical scale, I suppose, to an extent, but you're chair of the Dartmoor Land Use Management Group, so I wonder if we could take that as a case study. What impact do you expect the framework to have? On Dartmoor, land use and priorities.

37:32

Well, we're already part of the way down this line, I suppose, in terms of creating a land use framework. And, you know, this was one of the. The key recommendations that came out of the Fursden inquiry on Dartmouth was, well, that there should be the development of land, of a land use framework to, I suppose, engage people in that discussion and have a greater level of clarity over the way that we were going to use Dartmoor, that land users and the nation, I guess, were going to use Dartmoor. And I suppose it is worth just recognizing that Dartmoor, not just Dartmoor, but the Lake District, many of our upland common areas, you know, they are.

38:15

Are.

38:49

They're contested areas where there's huge amounts of expectations from everyone in terms of what they want from these lands. And increasingly, I suppose, year on year, more people want more things from our upland open common land areas at a time when the farmers are feeling under pressure and they're feeling their systems under pressure, and they don't quite know which way to go. So this was something we were charged to do, was to create a land use framework for Dartmoor. It's an upland area down in the southwest of England. Everyone knows where Dartmoor is. I guess it contains a huge amount of peat. There's areas of blanket bog, there's lots of watercourses on Dartmoor. It's an area that. It gets a huge amount of visitor attention as well. And so the other recommendation for Fursden was that we bring a group together to try to reconcile some of the views on land management on Dartmoor as well, and provide a safe space for there to be conversations and discussions and try to. To find a way through. So we're part of the way down this road already, and we've set three. We're talking a lot about principles today, aren't we? But I think it's. These principles are really important. But we've set three principles for our framework. The first one is that we start to pull together and map the physical and the biological capability of the land. And, you know, Dartmoor is a distinct or discrete area. But again, there's many different types of land area down on Dartmoor in terms of soil type and in terms of topography and hydrology and all sorts. So the first thing is to try and map the physical and biological capability of that land. The second pillar, the second principle, I guess, is to try to go through a process of prioritization about what different types of land should be used for. You know, there's a lot of Peat On Dartmoor, there are some areas that are fairly easy to rewet to, to block up some of the drainage and to re wet some of that peatland. There's also areas of deep peat where the topography is such that now because of centuries of peat cutting, to get the topography right to be able to hold water is probably impossible. You'd have to move millions of tons of earth to get that to work. So the second thing is about trying to understand what is possible on that land in a theoretical way on a map. And then the third pillar is really enabling those economic and management conditions to support those changes in land use. Now what does all that mean? I suppose it means that we're using a GIS spatial mapping to pull together all sorts of data sources that we can get. So it's underpinned by what we're calling a data observatory that's pulling together data from organizations such as Natural England. The local nature recovery strategy would be another one. The Southwest Peatland Partnership, Southwest Water. You know, all these individual organizations with, in the past they'd say that they had single interest. Again, they're becoming more multifunctional themselves anyway. But you know, they all hold data. So can we pull that data together to create a GIS spatial map to try to map out the special areas and what actually already exists? And then again in a theoretical way, look at, at where some of the opportunities might be to maybe plant some more trees? How do we protect some of the water courses? Where are the areas that we could re wet and create more blanket bog habitats where the areas of these vast areas of millennia, they aren't really delivering anything for nature and they aren't really delivering anything for food production and farming either. So where are those areas that we could focus some of the management to try to improve the site condition and, and create opportunities for grazing animals as well. And then what do we need financially, economically to make that work? Now if I could just finish this off for a second from that theoretical mapping, the next phase is to go out onto site and to ground truth or to test what that mapping is telling us. Does it really work in practice? Is it right? Does it tell us something that needs some more fine tuning on the ground? Now what we're trying to do is to deliver a number of trials on Dartmoor as well that will test the land use framework approach in a really practical way in terms of understanding what's there. Does it tell us the right thing? Are the opportunities that we think are there to improve nature or to re wet Peatland to store more carbon. Are they real in practice? Do we need to fine tune the mapping? And what do we need financially and economically in terms of media, social schemes and systems, landscape recovery, cs, higher tier to make that work? And then what we're trying to do is trial different ways that give another aspect to some of our understanding and our learning and our science. And I would say the challenge, maybe some of the current scientific guidance in terms of how some of that land should be managed, is it right? Are there different ways of doing this? Can we test it, can we trial it? And can we use the land use framework to model and capture that data as well?

38:49

Yeah, it sounds like the way that you're dealing with that framework on Dartmoor, of course, that meshes with the national framework, but really it's about enabling, having established those principles, enabling a conversation with the various different stakeholders down there to be able to have what sounds like a really powerful conversation about what that future is going to be and where that testing and trial is needed. You're able then to do that from a basis of sort of a shared understanding.

44:05

And again, it's a really valuable tool in terms of identifying what you might call those. They could be unintended consequences or consequences that we don't quite understand. You know, if we do this and it results in, I don't know, maybe, you know, the cattle farmers having pressure on their systems, what do we do about that? Is that right? Do we lose anything by losing those cattle or losing the ponies? Is it as grazing animals? And what do we understand the consequences of some of these actions? And if they're right, then what do we do to, in a way, provide a cushion, a safeguard for those people to do things in a slightly different way. So it's really, really exciting because I think the concept of the National Land Use Framework is really exciting, but we also need to bring it down to the ground, don't we, and think about how it works in our. In a practical situation? And again, Dartmoor is a great place to do this because it is a large area of common land. There are three landscape recovery bids going on on Dartmoor as well. So there's a lot of collaboration amongst farmers as well. So, you know, to bring people together and have those collective discussions. And not just farmers, you know, we're bringing farmers together with some of the environmental NGOs and the water companies and Natural England. So there's a really. Sometimes it's always a fascinating, sometimes it's a difficult crunching of ideas and ideals and Philosophies, really, but it's a healthy process.

44:34

There's no doubt there's a much bigger conversation there and maybe we could have that at some point, Phil. But it's interesting to sort of hear about the way that those principles, those frameworks, are enabling a conversation where there is a shared vested interest in the future that deals with the individual vested interests. And, you know, I remember sue going to a village meeting with a couple of hundred people a few months ago, where we were talking about housing and everybody was aware that there was a government housing ambition for 1.5 million new houses. Everybody agrees that there is a need for new homes, but nobody wanted the houses to be built anywhere near them. And they all thought that, you know, this particular village was not more important than any other village that existed in Dorset, let alone the country. And so the framework aims to reconcile national need with local impact, doesn't it? But surely this is always going to be a bit of a challenge. Even if renewables are only taking up a fraction of land use nationally, there are always going to be people campaigning to protect their views. So I wonder. We've heard a bit about it, I guess, in terms of that shared sort of vision and vested interests in terms of Dartmoor. But how can the framework help deal with these sort of multiple challenges that are going to exist across the country?

46:02

Yeah, I think that is difficult. It comes back to where I started at the outset that this is. And I guess what we're looking at is a national ambition, isn't it? And we have to understand the individual impacts and consider how we deal with those more individual and more localised challenges. And, I mean, I suppose it's got to be about bringing people together. It's got to be bringing people together so that, as far as possible, we are on a journey that we understand together and we can start to understand things from different, from other people's perspectives as well. There's always going to be some difficult decisions, and even in that world of nature, you know, on Dartmoor, you know, there's very different views about how we best improve conditions for Dartmoor. Is it through the exclusion of stock, or is it through more grazing animals and more management? And there are distinct views, but, you know, you just. The only thing you can do, I think, in those situations is bring people together and have a conversation.

47:17

Sue, what do you think?

48:16

I think Phil's right. The difficult decisions don't go away. But having a much more explicit, transparent and inclusive process to resolving them, it's kind of the only way through in our experience and we tested this out in the trials that we conducted building up to the publication of the framework. When people know and when people feel included, they're much more willing to lean into some of the difficult decisions. People, people abreact to what they perceive as being big, top down decisions when they don't feel involved and they don't feel included and they don't understand what the issues are. When we talked about housing in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, for example, people said over and over again, we're not anti housing, but we're anti the kind of CR. Crappy housing that developers want to build. Putting masses of houses in our community which our kids are not going to be able to afford to buy, or which doesn't have access to a school or access to health services. People want to live in lovely communities, in homes that, you know, provide affordable bills, that have nature around them, that have gardens, that their families can, can also stay in the community if they want to. That is what people want. And when they're involved upstream in the design process, not just the consultation process, here's the decision we've made earlier, would you mind just ticking it off? But when they're involved in the design process, you will find over and over again that people will back difficult decisions. When people are able to contribute their ground truth, if you like, what it really looks and feels like on the ground, what they know of their community, what they know of their ecology and their landscape, and see that taken into account, we're much more likely to get to robust, resilient and sustainable decisions, not just quick decisions.

48:17

We're running short of time and there's one issue that I just wanted to pick up on before we finish soon. And one of the key drivers of agricultural land use is diet. And for me, I only spotted one brief mention of diet in the framework. And yet how and what we eat impacts land use choices enormously. Should diet have been there in the land use framework? And if not, then how is the framework going to interact with other governmental policies and priorities?

50:19

Government is working right now on a food strategy and the relationship between the food strategy and the land use framework, as well as the farming roadmap and the agri food food pathway to Net zero are all intimately interlinked. The teams are working together on the relationship between all of those issues. One of the lovely things about the work we've been doing to support the food strategy with the Citizens Advisory Council and with citizens and with ministers looking at what actually works in places around the country. So we Just presented last week to the same minister that was launching the Land Use Framework yesterday. The results of our what works here inquiries where citizens visited Cornwall and Liverpool, Yorkshire and the Northeast to show the kind of materiality of the relationship between land use decisions, farming choices. An industrial strategy that supports the growth of good small, medium sized enterprises. What people are eating, how they can eat it, local public procurement, charitable responses to food insecurity and food and food poverty. Seeing how this works together in places brings it all to life. So I'm quite optimistic that already the food strategy is being developed. Understanding the relationship between land and how we use it. An industrial strategy that supports the growth of good businesses and health. What we need to be growing and eating more of to improve the public health, health and well being. So it's kind of happening behind the scenes. Could it be more explicit in this? Well, it would have been a much bigger paper, but I think the work's happening.

50:44

Yeah. Good. And Phil, just finally, just in half a minute, presumably, as sue says, the forthcoming farming roadmap and the food strategy, they're going to be really important for putting the Land Use Framework into context for farmers.

52:31

They absolutely will. You know, and I did, you know, my work on Dartmoori, sometimes I ask the question, question about whether we can redesign some of this land management in a really sensitive way using very traditional techniques, sometimes using native breeds, and whether that fits with some of the global supply chains, the more industrial aspects of our industry really. And I'm hopeful that the roadmap will actually just take us back in a little bit of a direction towards more localization, more regionalization, which sue says we'll create a whole host of local enterprise, local economies, local jobs and local interaction in an area which can only be a good thing. And the only other thing I'd like to add that whilst I agree with that for food, I'd love to, with my other hat on, I'd love to see it for wool as well. Of course we are seeing a resurgence in wool values, but again, your wool is still so underutilized and undervalued and I think we will turn a corner in terms of the value and the uses and the localization and the provenance of wool as well.

52:43

Yeah, that's really important point to end on. Not just wool, but fiber more generally and sort of integrating fiber with food and of course the infrastructure that's necessary, which of course comes into that whole sort of planning and development piece as well, doesn't it? Thanks, Phil. And that's it. That's all we have time for. I'd like to thank my guests Phil Stocker and Sue Pritchard. If you've enjoyed listening, please come back and listen to more. Tell your friends like us, review us and share our links. Farmgate is the world's highest ranking food security podcast and we're part of89.com, the land use news channel, which is supported by First Milk, Pelican Ag, the Nature Friendly Farming Network, Friars Moor Livestock Health, Agrolo, and individual donors. I've been Finlow Costain Bye for now.

53:46