Environment Secretary, Elizabeth Truss, gave her first major environment speech today. You can read it here.
The stand-out announcement was the Wild Pollinator and Farm Wildlife Package. This will form part of the new agri-environment package for England, which we now know will, in a back to the future moment, be called Countryside Stewardship.
While full details of the new Stewardship may not emerge for a couple of weeks, we know enough to welcome today's announcement.
I have been impressed by the approach that Ministers and officials have taken to developing the new package for wildlife-friendly farming. They have been keen to learn from past experience, involve key organisations from both the conservation and farming community and, most importantly, they have been clear that their priority is recovering farmland wildlife.
The urgency is obvious: the farmland bird index is at its lowest level ever and, as the State of Nature report documented, other taxa have shown similar declines.
Crucially, the Defra team have been determined to get the most out of the money they have available. The £3 billion over the next six years is less, of course, than they might have had thanks to the NFU's lobbying against the full transfer of funds from direct farm support to agri-environment. But a well designed Stewardship programme will mean that the farmers that enter into the schemes, hopefully benefiting from the right level of advice, should be confident that their efforts will deliver results.
So we are nearing the end of a three year campaign to ensure that at least some of the £15 billion of taxpayers money going into farming over the next six years will deliver good things for the environment. Once the dust settles and the new schemes bed in, I hope that we can resuscitate a conversation about what else we can do for wildlife in those parts of country that will not benefit from these schemes.
But, for now, I am delighted to say well done to Defra.
Good plan, Redkite, but I think she'll need the Foreign Secretary to help land Ascension, MPA!
I would like to second that Martin. What a niece change to have something which seems to be really meaningful and positive from Defra. It is just a shame that the total monies for this wildlife friendly farming are not considerably greater. They could have been if the original farming budget proposed within the EU had not been cut under pressure from Ministers including our UK prime minister and then cut again by the prime minister after the very negative intervention from the NFU.
Anyway perhaps Liz Trust can maintain her positive run by, amongst other things, now declaring a large marine protection area around Ascension Island, one of Britain's OSTs, let,s hope so.
redkite