each body asking for slightly different information, or even the same information in a slightly different way. Mr Gove went on to say that while he aimed, as part of the Brexit process, to make DEFRA ‘more efficient, focussed and, above all, innovative’, he also wanted to drive change in four specific areas: firstly to develop a coherent policy on food, secondly, to give farmers and land managers time and the tools needed to adapt to the future, thirdly, to develop a new method of providing financial support for farmers which moves away from subsidies for inefficiency to ‘public money for public goods’ and, finally, to ensure that ‘we build natural capital thinking into our approach towards all land use and management so we develop a truly sustainable future for the countryside’. Mr Gove went on to develop his four themes. Encouragingly,
he said that he recognised that the heart of almost all farming businesses was food production. Food and drink was the UK’s biggest manufacturing sector and one of its fastest growing, with an increase of 8 per cent in exports to the EU and 10 per cent in exports outside the EU in the first nine months of 2017 alone. Mr Gove argued that Government had to realise that its
interventions need to be targeted, proportionate and, above all, limited. Subsidies linked to the size of land holding or headage payments rewarded incumbents, restricted new thinking and, he argued, ultimately held back innovation and efficiency. In a clear reference to agriculture’s use of migrant labour, he said that industries which had come ‘to rely on importing cheap labour run the risk of failing to
invest in the innovation required to become genuinely more productive. Labour-intensive production inevitably lags behind capital-intensive production’. Mr Gove then discussed the vexed question, in the context of Brexit, of managing change. Given the scale and the nature of the changes that were coming,
he recognised that farmers needed to be given the time, and the tools, to ‘become more adaptable’. Government would be saying more about its plans in a White Paper to be published later this spring, which this column will, it goes without saying, be looking out for. He said that land owners and managers had to make the transition
from our current system of subsidy to a new approach of public money for public goods. Although the UK would formally leave the EU in March 2019, the Government anticipated that the UK and the EU would agree to an extended implementation or transition period. Government had guaranteed that the amount allocated to farm support, in cash terms, would be protected throughout and beyond this period right up until the end of the current Parliament in 2022. Mr Gove added that he envisaged guaranteeing that BPS payments
would continue for a transitional period in England, which should last a number of years beyond the implementation period, depending on the outcome of consultation. During these years, DEFRA proposed to first reduce the largest BPS payments in England. This could be done through a straight cap set at a maximum level or via a sliding scale of reductions, affecting the largest payments first. After the implementation period, this transitional payment could be paid to the recipient without the need to comply with all the onerous existing cross-compliance rules and procedures. Inspections would, of course, continue but on the streamlined and risk based fashion described earlier. Mr Gove said that, provided our own animal welfare, environmental
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and other laws were observed, this payment would be guaranteed. This should provide every existing farmer who received a BPS payment with a guaranteed income over this extended transition period, giving time for farmers to change their business model if necessary and to help make the investment for any adjustments and ‘prepare for the future’. Provisions would also be made for those farmers who, for whatever reason, might choose to leave the industry. After that transition, Mr Gove said that the Basic Payments
Scheme would be replaced by ‘a system of public money for public goods’. Readers will ask what are ‘public goods’? The principal public
good in which government would invest was, of course, environmental enhancement. In thinking about how better to support farmers in the work of environmental protection and enhancement it was to recognise that there was ‘no inherent tension between productive farming and care for the natural world ’. ‘Quite the opposite’, Mr Gove opined. He said that he had seen for himself how many of the UK’s best farmers in terms of productivity and progressiveness placed thoughtful environmental practice and careful husbanding of resources at the heart of their businesses.
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