The Natural Capital Committee has published its advice and recommendations on what the Government should consider in developing their 25 year environment plan.
It includes the NCC’s thoughts on what the plan should aim to achieve, how it will do that and what success will look like. However, heritage does not feature in the proposed goals for the plan set out on page 4. When the Alliance meets Michael Gove next week we will stress that heritage should be thought about at a high strategic level in the 25 year plan and forthcoming Agriculture Bill.
The report set out ways Government could invest to achieve these goals such as investment opportunities’. These include:
Develop and implement a comprehensive network of marine protected areas;
Designate new national parks to protect and enhance natural capital and cultural heritage;
Enable a more strategic natural capital investment approach to be taken at an area level. Developer (housing, business and industry) contributions are pooled and invested in priority natural capital improvements.
In noting the limitations of the current support system the report states that much ‘support is allocated on an area basis, so bigger farms get more support; indeed 25% of farms capture nearly three-quarters of public subsidy. This in turn means that a large proportion of public funding goes to some of the richest farms in the country, whilst many smaller farms (including many that are vital elements of our environmental, landscape and rural community heritage) receive relatively little in income support’.
Echoing our paper on rural heritage the report states that ‘Public funding should be closely targeted to the delivery of public goods [such as heritage]… At present such schemes account for a small proportion of agricultural subsidies, yet these are important benefits to society which farms currently provide for relatively modest (and arguably inadequate) reward’.