Shaping the countryside we want and nature needs: how to spend c£2 billion of English taxpayers' money

In the next week or two, Defra is set to release their proposals for the implementation of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) in England. The rest of the UK is either already consulting on theirs, as in Northern Ireland and Wales, or planning to do so.

It’s no exaggeration to say that the future shape of the CAP will have a significant, and in some instances decisive influence over the future shape of our countryside, and many of the species that call it home.  It is the single biggest opportunity to do something to address the declines in farmland wildlife documented in the recent State of Nature report: not just farmland birds (↓50% over the last four decades) but also carabid beetles (↓64%) and farmland moths (↓70%).

I’ve written about the CAP many times before (for example see here and here), and it can be an impenetrable and frustrating policy for all involved, for the civil servants responsible with drawing it up, NGOs trying to keep up with the process but especially the farmers tasked with making sense of it so they can adapt their businesses.  

At its root though, the CAP is a multi-billion pound policy which has the potential to do both harm to the natural environment, but also a great deal of good.  Where the balance falls is in large part down to each government in how they implement it, and between now and early next year, Defra will be deciding how to do so in England. 

The consultation Defra publish will be the best chance that the public have had to influence the shape of this critical policy for around seven years, and it will be the last chance to do so until 2020.  

So, I will be using this blog over the next few days to talk all things CAP (covering exciting topics such as "transfers", "greening", "scheme design", "institutional architecture"), and outline our views on just what Defra should be doing to ensure the CAP delivers for the environment, and in the process, for the public purse.  

And that last point is key.  For a policy with such a low profile, the CAP represents a large amount of public money. Between 2014 and 2020, nigh on £20 billion of public money will be spent in the UK alone. In 2012, UK farmers and land managers received £3.26 billion in public payments, with £2.055 billion of this being spent in England.

Big issue number 1: Transfers

We’ve been campaigning to reform the CAP for years, focusing our efforts to shift this expenditure away from direct subsidies, (whose objectives are poorly defined and often inefficiently achieved), to payments for public goods, such as an attractive countryside, rich in wildlife to which people have access. In the jargon, this means moving money from Pillar I direct payments, to Pillar II Rural Development Programmes including agri-environment schemes such as England’s Higher Level Stewardship.

Despite our best efforts, and the efforts and many others besides across Europe, direct payments will still receive around 75% of the CAP budget.  

To his credit, Secretary of State Own Paterson has been one of the few progressive voices during this round of reform, and has led the Defra fight to boost funding for Pillar II. As a result, the final deal, rubber stamped just last week, offers the scope to transfer 15% of direct subsidies toward Pillar II, and therefore the agri-environment schemes which will be so important to the conservation of our wildlife.  Yet, the opposition against transfers, led by the NFU, is vocal.  There have been scare-stories in the farming press about this being farmers' money and that it will somehow be taken away from them.  This is nonsense. In reality, money transferred will primarily be used to reward farmers that help give wildlife a home on their farms.  

It is important that the Secretary of State sticks to his guns, transfers the full 15% into Pillar II and continues to argue for the CAP to move towards a policy focused on the provision of public goods, from which the whole of society can benefit.

Encouragingly, the Secretary of State seems firm on this maximum transfer, recently confirming in the House of Commons his ‘long standing belief’ that it’s the right thing to do, and our own Westminster Wigeon tells me that the message was the same at fringe meetings at the Conservative Party Conference this week. This step is essential to ensure that the funding is available for the agri-environment schemes which will be the key mechanism needed for government to meet it commitments for example in the Natural Environment White Paper and in Biodiversity 2020.  More importantly, it will be farmers that enter these schemes who will provide a lifeline for some of our most threatened species such as turtle dove, lapwing and curlew.

In reality though, a maximum transfer is just the first step that Defra need to take. Over the next few days I'll outline other decisions that Government need to take in the next few months, and the tests that we will apply to assess if there proposals are to get  anywhere near a CAP that works for wildlife friendly farming.

For now, I'll leave you with this question...

How would you spend c£2.055 billion of English taxpayers' money a year?   [This is equivalent to the salaries of 66,151 nurses per year, the gas and electricity bills of 1,447,183 households, 146 secondary schools, tuition fees for 228,333 students per year,  the annual public funding for 9098 libraries or you could cover the  annual cost of environmental options needed to meet all of England’s environmental policy objectives and have c£800m to spend on other things - see page iv of this government report here.]

It would be great to hear your views.