Distribution of funding across different land management schemes in England
Upland areas in England have so far received less than their promised share of new farming support, jeopardising climate and nature targets.
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Defra’s changes to farm payments in England are one of the biggest reforms to agriculture policy in a generation. As legacy area subsidies dating from the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) are phased out, three new ‘environmental land management’ (ELM) schemes are being phased in.
These are the widely available Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI), designed to support simple measures across a wide range of farm types, particularly in the lowlands.
This is the only scheme currently available to apply for. The other two are the overhauled Countryside Stewardship (CS) ‘higher-tier’, intended to fund more targeted and complex management at the farm scale, and the Landscape Recovery scheme, designed to fund landscape scale land use change by partnerships of farmers and land managers.
This analysis looks at how SFI funding is distributed by National Character Area (NCA), a geography used by Natural England to target scheme payments. We compare this with the distribution of Higher Level Stewardship (HLS) payments, the predecessor to the CS higher tier, with a focus on the uplands.
We find that upland areas have not been able to access the SFI to anything like the same extent as HLS, or even in a way that reflects their share of England’s land area (15%).
Only 8% of SFI funding currently goes to the uplands, despite the fact that they present the greatest potential for meeting climate and nature targets.
This compares to 42% of HLS scheme value in 2024. This is creating an increasingly acute issue for hill farming finances. Farm incomes in these areas are amongst the lowest of any sector, and delays to rolling out a refreshed CS higher tier scheme are now posing major problems for farm finances in the uplands, as well as holding back progress on climate and nature targets.
These results suggest that upland areas and the hill farming sector has not been able to access the SFI to anything like the same extent as was possible with HLS. This is not surprising given the way in which the SFI has been tailored towards lowland and more intensive farming systems. This does to reflect a failure of the SFI necessarily – this was always its intended purpose.
It more reflects a failure of successive governments to implement a higher-tier scheme capable of supporting action for climate and nature goals across landscapes more dominated by semi-natural habitats such as moorland, species rich grassland, wet grassland and heath. These areas tend to be economically marginal, meaning that the environmental consequences of not having a higher tier scheme operating at scale are now being compounded by increasingly significant negative impacts on farm incomes in these areas.
In order to meet climate targets relating to land use needed to meet the Climate Act target of net zero emissions, and nature and water targets under the Environment Act, moving now to launch a higher tier scheme capable of achieving much higher levels of uptake will be essential. This will also be the most effective means of supporting farm incomes in these areas.