Replacing set-aside

Hilary Benn accepts the need to compensate for the loss of set-aside

03/09/2008

It was welcome news at the end of July, when Secretary of State Hilary Benn announced his intention to bring in environmental measures to compensate for the loss of set-aside.

To recap; the sudden announcement by the EU Commission in summer last year to reduce the  set-aside requirement for farmers from 8% to 0% caused a considerable shock to organisations like ours which had been basing much of their farmland conservation on set-aside land. We and other groups, especially the RSPB, realised that set-aside had been helping farmland birds. Although these birds have not staged any dramatic recovery, in some instances declines have been stemmed and studies by the BTO suggest that set-aside was a favoured by a range of species. Also the improving numbers of brown hares over the past decade coincided with the introduction of set-aside.

We are still appalled that the EU Commission could have made such a big policy change without any apparent consideration of the environment. Nevertheless, at least now it has agreed to consider some measures that might be put in place to offset the damage.  In this year's CAP Health Check it is proposing better protection of landscape features and wider buffer strips adjacent to water courses. This certainly won't be enough and we are pleased that Hilary Benn will be pushing for something more radical. He has now indicated that he supports the recommendations of a policy group he set up to look into the subject. This group, chaired by Sir Don Curry (who had previously produced the report Farming and Food  for Tony Blair following the foot and mouth crisis of 2001) made its final report at the end of July. This opts for bringing in a requirement for all arable farmers to put a certain percentage of land into environmental management. Cleverly it suggests that payments could be made under Environmental Stewardship to defray additional costs for managing this land to aid wildlife such as for bird seed mixtures. This is a good idea

The details are being discussed at present and no doubt the nub will be on how much land farmers will be required to put into this environmental management. We suspect that the smaller this fraction is, the tighter will have to be the rules it on how it is managed and sited in relation to other habitats on the farm. We suspect the details will not be agreed with the EU until 2009 so we would support Defra in encouraging farmers to continue to retain some of their existing set-aside with this in mind,