Following DEFRA's consultation earlier this year on the future uplands reward structure in England, we have decided to fully integrate uplands support within environmental stewardship.
We consulted on the basis of moving away from THE compensatory nature of the hill farm allowance and towards a scheme which rewards farmers for maintaining the upland landscape and environment.
After reviewing the consultation responses, and taking into account the need for effective planning and implementation, we are now minded to put in place a specific uplands strand to the entry level stewardship scheme by no later than 2010.
Uplands entry level stewardship will enable us to recognise the key role of upland farmers in delivering many of our environmental and landscape objectives, whilst also enabling us to better target the funding towards the delivery of public benefits. Like ELS, this new uplands strand would be open to all eligible farmers, and would offer a higher payment than ELS to reflect the higher costs of farming in these areas.
To ensure fullest environmental benefit, further scoping work is needed with Natural England and stakeholders. There will then be a further consultation on the final scheme design prior to implementation.
Higher level stewardship will of course continue to be available in the uplands, and we will keep the balance of funding between HLS and UELS under review.
In the interim, we will continue to roll forward the hill farm allowance for three years from 2007 to 2009. Moving directly to uplands entry level stewardship from the hill farm allowance will avoid the costs to industry and Government of implementing a separate transitional scheme.
We also consulted on our plans to reduce the geographic coverage of the hill farm allowance (and future uplands support) by removing the “disadvantaged areas” (DA) from the scheme, thereby focusing uplands support on farms in the “severely disadvantaged areas” (SDA). We propose to do this from 2008. This proposal received general support in the consultation, given that in comparison to the SDA, land in the DA is generally higher grade agricultural land, is more accessible, and producers have more options to maximise the potential of the land. In addition, the single payment scheme will, over time, tend to favour farmers in the DA in comparison to the SDA (since the DA is subsumed within the lowland for the purpose of defining SPS regions and therefore receives a higher flat rate payment than the SDA).
The money saved by limiting the geographic coverage of the hill farm allowance will be retained within the rural development programme for England, to boost the funds available under environmental stewardship, including in the uplands. We have made a separate announcement today about the contingency arrangements we have put in place to cover the delay to the start of the next rural development programme in England.