Green Alliance has been calling for a Land Use Framework since before I joined the organisation four years ago. The government first committed to it in 2022, and I wrote a briefing on what we wanted from it soon after. Since then, there’s been a change of government and a churn of five Defra secretaries of state. But, last week, following a consultation, the finished item landed: the Land Use Framework is here.
Does the framework reconcile all the competing demands on land? The challenge set for the framework was to deal with the issue that we want to use our limited land area for too many things: housing, food production, climate mitigation, nature recovery, energy infrastructure and more. Defra’s analysts have reached the conclusion that – good news – we do in fact have enough land for everything, while maintaining food production.
This conclusion was reached by assuming multifunctionality and “more efficient land use”. There’s an assumption that yields will increase in line with historic trends, which may be difficult to do in the face of a changing climate. The framework promises an assessment of the impacts of climate change under 2oC and 4oC warming scenarios. Those findings must be integrated into the promised iterations of the framework for any assumptions about food production to be realistic. This would also clarify the benefits to farmers of some of the changes the framework outlines, like how planting trees in the uplands can store carbon, as well as shade and shelter livestock in times of extreme weather.
Is it ambitious enough? There are changes in the amounts of land the final version of the framework describes for different uses, compared to what was initially presented in the consultation. It seems this is due to a cooling on bioenergy crops, which we first saw in the refreshed Carbon Budget Delivery Growth Plan last year. It’s good to see that the government is stepping away from dedicating land to grow crops to burn, which is likely to increase greenhouse gas emissions if additional land has to be cleared to accommodate the displaced food production.
Aside from this, ambitions around woodland creation and peat restoration seem to have survived largely intact from the consultation, though figures are based on the government’s analysis which sets a lower bar compared to that of its adviser, the Climate Change Committee.
The Land Use Framework admits that progress so far on protecting 30 per cent of land for nature by 2030 has been poor, with the current figure standing at just seven per cent. A future plan has been mooted to accelerate delivery.
How will the framework be implemented? The framework document itself will be of no use without implementation. Whether it succeeds depends on meeting the commitments it sets out, and much of that job will fall to the newly formed Land Use Unit. To be effective, this unit must not be siloed into one part of Defra, but be strategically situated to help in all the places that must be involved in implementing the framework.
Amongst the most important commitments are those promising to integrate spatial prioritisation into Environmental Land Management (ELM) support, by 2027 at the earliest for some Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) actions, and then more widely across other ELM schemes by 2030. There are interesting attempts to join up national, regional and local policy making, so we will know whether local commitments made through Local Nature Recovery Strategies (LNRS) will add up to the national targets set.
The problem of funding remains, with none linked to LNRS and an insufficient farming budget that urgently needs supplementing through nascent private markets.
Does it do enough on other land uses like housing and energy? Many have called for the framework to get into issues of where houses, solar farms and energy infrastructure should be built. Green Alliance has been more reserved on this. We are content that there are spatial plans already for those land uses and are keen to see the framework focus on land types where there is no strategic planning currently (food, climate, nature). We think it does what it needs to do in considering housing and energy land uses, setting principles to safeguard the best land, but not trying to rewrite existing policies.
Where next? The framework commits the government to a raft of next steps, including via the Farming Roadmap, due later this year, a policy that will grapple with what the commitment to maintain food production means.
In our view, there must be an approach centred on reducing the country’s overall land use footprint overseas. It shouldn’t focus on maintaining individual products, as this would lock in high levels of lamb production, for instance, despite demand already falling below what is produced. There’s a lot to do to increase certainty about how ELM schemes will evolve in future, including to achieve the changes the framework now sets out.
The new framework is no doubt a huge moment to be celebrated. Now the attention must turn immediately to what’s needed next to deliver its more efficient vision for land use.
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