Ministers kill off farmers’ hopes for return to livestock payments

UPLANDS support will continue to move away from payments for farming productivity and towards payments for looking after the hills and their peat moors, wildlife and water, Ministers have made it clear.

The Efra Committee, a House of Commons watchdog for the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, recently published recommendations for assisting upland farming which included suggesting a return to “headage payments” for livestock produced.

A lot of farmers think the old-style system of rewarding productivity could be updated to overcome its former flaws and would be simpler and fairer – and better for national food security – than the bureaucratically top-heavy stewardship payments which have taken its place. These reward farmers for restoring stone walls, blocking up peatland drains and encouraging lapwings, rather than producing young sheep and cattle for fattening or breeding in the lowlands.

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But yesterday the Efra Committee published the written response it had received from Government to its Farming In The Uplands report.

The response was put together by the various Ministries with an interest, led by Defra.

It said headage subsidies would distort “market signals” and would encourage environmental damage through over-grazing. It was much more sympathetic to Efra ideas for paying farmers more for holding back rain water and keeping their streams clean, in the interests of river quality and flood defences further downhill.

Broadly speaking the Government said it was already doing all it could in most of the directions explored by the Efra Committee.

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It said it would be making a Rural Policy Statement “before summer” which would give more detail about its plans to address rural needs and interests “...across a broad range of policy areas including broadband, housing, health, education, economic development, fuel and energy, transport and services”.

It added: “The important role of localism and the Big Society will be suffused throughout.”

Farmers will find it significant that the list of concerns to be addressed does not include increasing British food production.

The Tory MP for the Thirsk and Malton, Ann McIntosh, who is chairman of the Efra Committee, said: “I am a little disappointed. The Government has gone into a lot of detail without saying much and I think it has missed an opportunity. Our report was well received by farmers.”

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The Tenant Farmers Association said: “The market has consistently failed to deliver a sufficient return to the livestock breeder which has accelerated the decline of breeding flocks and herds in upland areas. Ideologically and out of hand, Defra has dismissed the idea of headage payments without identifying what could be done instead.”

The Government did promise further consideration of two problems particularly concerning farmers in the Yorkshire dales and moors.

One is the difficulty that tenant farmers on short-term leases have had plugging into the main new source of subsidy, the uplands entry-level stewardship scheme known as UELS.

Defra said it had been looking into the issue and a report is imminent.

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Another grumble passed on by the Efra MPs is that Natural England, environmental arm of Defra, is obsessed with the risk of over-grazing and has driven down allowable sheep numbers un-necessarily. Defra said Natural England was listening to grazing forums and trying to be more adaptable to local conditions. See http://tinyurl.com/6x57oc4/