Countryside Stewardship Scheme

Where does the money come from?

Everything we've done today to date in land use change has been funded through Countryside Stewardship.

We've had 10 years where we've been really well supported.

I would say, you know, I'll be accused of, oh, just you were taking BPS and now you're just taking another subsidy.

Um, and maybe fundamentally other outcomes.

The fundamental problem is everybody's putting all the focus on SFI and not the other three e- two elements of the Environmental Land Management plan, the Countryside Stewardship higher tier, and the Landscape Recovery.

So, you know, they're, they're, they're putting the highlight of it's broken, it's not delivering, and it's not working, but they're not been out, you know, and they're not in power to talk about those solutions of how we're gonna bridge the gap of many schemes ending and the not enough funding in that pot, and how do we get people getting rewarded for other outcomes in different places.

And in terms of the economy, uh, they're talking about more development, and they're gonna unlock that growth through more building.

I did work with, with some great people, but, you know, it was restricted in what I could do.

So went down to, um, Devon, and I was a estate land manager for five shoots on Exmoor, and then I m- moved back, worked for CLA as a rural advisor, and then I became a senior policy advisor within, in the London office for a while, working with DEFRA about what countryside stewardship's gonna look like at that point.

So I was with them for about nine years, and that led me to GWCT.

So yeah, finished my maternity leave and I was like, "What am I gonna do?" COVID hit, things have changed.

Yeah, so a farmer cluster basically is a group of people who come together that have got a like mind to either increase biodiversity on their land or look at soil health or water within a catchment or within area.

They work best if they're contiguous landowners, so they, you can work across a big landscape scale, and they generally have priorities of species or habitats.

Um, and they either are self-funded, so they're independent, or they went through what was countryside stewardship-

Yeah

So I couldn't increase any of my areas for nectar pollen mixes, wild bird feed.

that sort of thing i wasn't able to put certain actions with other actions which should have been able to go together so i wasn't able to put grass margins in the same block as pollen nectar mixes so i was getting i was beset by a number of problems straight from the off i could i assumed that my current countryside stewardship which runs out in december was maybe blocking this But I didn't know because they'd said when I'd rung previously that that shouldn't be a problem.

So by 11 o'clock, I decided to ring the dreaded RPA phone line, which took over 30 minutes before I could even get on hold to be then told that I was 51st in the queue.

with an estimated wait time of over three hours, which then got me starting to panic about whether I'd be able to get to hospital in time.

And we have to see a better route forward.

Now, we've made various proposals around a price per hectare cap, thinking about ways in which they can support farmers to make sure that they're looking at the best option for them.

You know, is it SFI or is it countryside stewardship higher tier you know where which is the best place for the land management options that they want to look at but in order to do that farmers need to know that there is SFI 27 and they need to know that they can access countryside stewardship higher tier and at the moment we don't have any of that confidently on the table for farmers to make that decision so instead we find ourselves in first come first served that's bad enough but also in a It's good enough agreements, just trying to get something across the line.

And that doesn't work for businesses and it doesn't work for the environment.

tier.

That's the countryside stewardship.

Yeah, countryside stewardship.

So that all farmers can make informed choices about the schemes that they're implying for.

The budget we don't have enough transparency on, which also undermines confidence.