The government is to slash the nature-friendly farming budget in England by £100m in order to help fill what ministers say is a £22bn Treasury shortfall, the Guardian can reveal.
Nature groups and farmers have called this a “big mistake”, saying it jeopardised the government’s legally binding targets to improve nature.
This cut would mean at least 239,000 fewer hectares of nature-friendly farmland, according to research by the RSPB, and this could increase if the smaller budget puts farmers off applying.
Civil service sources told the Guardian ministers were blaming an underspend of £100m a year from the £2.4bn budget for the cut, saying that because the Conservative government failed to spend the whole pot, it made it impossible to justify keeping it at that level to the Treasury.
The chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has asked departments including the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) to each find more than £1bn in savings, with others ordered to find hundreds of millions of pounds in order to help close the funding gap in the nation’s budget that Reeves says was left by the Tories.
The environment secretary, Steve Reed, promised earlier this year that Labour would “cut through the Tory bureaucracy that has blocked farmers from receiving funding for work that includes protecting nature and wildlife habitats on their land” in response to reports of the underspend, and accused the Conservatives of breaking their promise to farmers.
After the UK left the EU, farmers were no longer part of the common agricultural policy subsidies scheme, which paid land managers according to the acreage they farmed. Instead the devolved nations have set up their own farming payments system. In England, this is the environment land management scheme (Elms), which pays farmers to support nature by, for example, letting hedges grow wilder, or sowing wildflowers for birds and bees on field margins.
A report last month found butterflies, birds and bats are among the wildlife being boosted by the English scheme, and some areas had increased their bird numbers by 25%.
Nature groups said financial support for sustainable agriculture needed to be increased, and certainly not cut, if the targets to halt species decline by 2030 were to be met.
Alice Groom, the head of sustainable land use policy at the RSPB, said: “Whilst we recognise the financial challenges government faces, investment in nature-friendly farming is critical, not just to meet our legally binding nature and climate targets, but also in order to underpin our national food security and the health of the economy.
“A £100m reduction in funding would see 239,000 hectares less nature-friendly farmland, and a failure to invest in nature and climate is predicted to shrink the economy by 12% – an impact greater than Covid and the financial crash. As the latest independent research has found, we need to increase the agriculture budget in England, from £2.4bn to £3.1bn a year, if we are to ensure the future of our vanishing farmland birds and wildlife, clean rivers and thriving farming and rural businesses.”
Vicki Hird, strategic lead on agriculture at the Wildlife Trusts, added: “Cutting the Elms budget would be a very big mistake. Funding for nature’s recovery is absolutely critical to securing a prosperous and resilient future – to ensure that soils aren’t washed away, to secure a future for pollinators, and to help farms adapt to periods of heavy rainfall and drought. Any move to reduce funding for restoring nature will put farm businesses at greater risk of suffering from the impacts of climate change and will lead to greater economic costs in the long term.”
The National Farmers’ Union said a cut to the budget would risk further undermining farmer confidence, which was already at a record low, and weaken food security.
The NFU’s president, Tom Bradshaw, said: “We have seen a collapse in farmers’ confidence, driven by record inflation, falls in farm income, and unprecedented weather patterns delivering relentless rain this year and a near drought last year.
“In opposition the government consistently made clear its commitment to agriculture as a key driver of growth. Now it needs to deliver on that commitment. This government has said food security is national security. Now is the time to restore confidence by setting a multi-annual agriculture budget at the level needed to deliver economic growth in all that farming delivers for Britain.”
A Treasury spokesperson said: “Following the spending audit, the chancellor has been clear that difficult decisions lie ahead on spending, welfare and tax to fix the foundations of our economy and address the £22bn hole in the public finances left by the last government. Decisions on how to do that will be taken at the budget in the round.”
