Written evidence submitted by the Foundation for Common Land (LUN0084)

How should Government nurture upland farms and landscapes?

Response from the Foundation for Common Land

Thank you for the opportunity to submit evidence to Efra’s Inquiry on ‘How the Government should nurture upland farms and landscapes’. We would also be delighted to give oral evidence if helpful.

The Foundation for Common Land is a Registered Charity, which works for the public benefit. We are not a membership organisation. Our purposes are:

●        To conserve the cultural landscapes delivered by commoning and the management of common land

●        To promote the conservation of the physical and natural environment by supporting the responsible and sustainable pastoral use of common land

●        To conduct research into commoning and common land issues

●        To educate the public about commoning and common land

For more information see www.foundationforcommonland.org.uk

Our response focuses on how Government can nurture upland commons through supporting the 3900 active commoners in England who have rights on this land, as well as the owners of commons. It is the farming and land management that they undertake that determines the future flows of public goods from commons. The vast majority of active commoners farm in the Uplands. 38% of all Moorland in England is registered common land.

Common Land in England extends to approximately 400,000 ha and is critical to the delivery of public goods. Despite registered common land making up just 3% of England, it contains 21% of England’s SSSI area and 12% of all Scheduled Ancient Monuments. When we consider beauty and engagement commons are critical as 39% of all Open Access land is common land and 82% of common land is in our Protected Landscapes.  

Crucial to enhancing both the cultural and natural heritage of common land, is recognising our natural scenery and flow of public goods as a product of a farming system - commoning. Without investing in commoning, the underpinning collaborative pastoral grazing system, and its biocultural processes the future flow of multiple public benefits to wider society will decline.

The Foundation for Common Land is increasingly concerned that Defra’s failure to roll out ELM schemes on common land threatens businesses, nature recovery, climate change mitigation, our protected landscapes and society’s health and well-being.

Julia Aglionby: Executive Director (England)

Foundation for Common Land’s Responses to Efra’s Upland’s 2026 Inquiry Questions:

1. How effectively do current policies balance competing demands in the uplands, including food production, nature recovery, climate mitigation, water management, and public access, and where do the key tensions remain?

Common land is multi-functional and the fact it has never been enclosed has kept in a creative tension the multiple demands of the land for farming, nature, landscape, recreation, water, sporting, and the historic environment. Common Land is seven times more likely to be designated for nature than enclosed land and four times more likely to have a Scheduled Ancient Monument than enclosed land. Two-fifths of all CROW Open Access land is common land and over 80% of common land is in Protected Landscapes.

It is worth noting that is the 1500s over 50% of England was common land which through enclosure has been reduced to only 3%.

Current Defra policy and scheme implementation is ineffectual at balancing competing demands in the uplands for four key reasons:

1. Environmental Stewardship schemes, whether the old HLS and CS schemes or the new ELM schemes, are solely focused on the delivery of ecological outcomes and habitat improvement. There are no payments for food production, public access or landscape and very few for climate mitigation except for peatland restoration. Our major Lottery Project, Our Upland Commons developed a Stepping Stones to sustainable common land – akin to a theory of change.[1] The three steps are to firstly build trust and effective relationships between people, secondly to ensure farm businesses will be viable and thirdly, building on the first two steps to deliver environmental outcomes.

2. Policies and government targets require effective schemes to reward the delivery of public benefits that are not paid for ‘at the till’ i.e. in the auction mart / dead stock markets. Many commons remain in the old ES/CS schemes due to the failure by the Defra group to roll out the new ELM schemes at scale or pace. These legacy schemes are poorly paid and unambitious compared with the new ELM schemes. The result is a missed opportunity to deliver more for nature, climate and farming businesses.

3. The focus of upland farmers tends to be livestock enterprises especially for commoners and tenants whose rights of common are for grazing. England’s 6,200 commercial upland and hill farmers have adapted their livestock businesses in response to the demand over the last 30 years to improve ecological outcomes but at the heart of their identity and drive remains the production of good quality sheep and cattle. While there are an increasing number of nature friendly farmers for whom environment outcomes are central to their identity, many hill farmers and commoners would do more if schemes were accessible and capital works funding did not require huge upfront outlay. All farmers are stymied in delivering more public goods by the painfully slow roll out of new ELM and additional barriers include lack of funding for skills and training for farmers and access to local evidence to underpin planning. 

4. Profitability is a key factor in farm business decision making. Farmers have ever since WW2 responded with alacrity to government incentives. The challenge currently is that the financial incentive to adopt nature friendly practices is limited as Defra is no longer considered a reliable business partner to provide public money for public goods. For instance, new CSHT schemes on commons will last ten years but have a break clause every six months, only in favour of Defra. This is inequitable and a friction on scheme take up especially when access is so challenging and competitive. 

2. What has been the impact of agricultural policy changes (including the transition away from direct payments) on upland farming businesses, and the impact of these changes on farming profitability?

Below is some modelling of the impact on the average English Hill Farm of phasing out of direct payments (BPS). This has been undertaken by our Executive Director, Julia Aglionby using the data collected by Defra’s Farm Business Survey. Agricultural production is now break even or turning a slight profit (livestock prices have increased) but the loss of BPS means that the average hill farm business is highly dependent on income from ELM and diversification.

3. To what extent do the current Environmental Land Management (ELM) schemes and other support like the Farming in Protected Landscapes (FiPL) schemes support financially and environmentally sustainable land management in the uplands?

ELM schemes are critical to the delivery of sustainable land management in the uplands. They currently comprise over 65% of Farm Business Income for upland farms and this is forecast to increase to over 70% of Farm Business Income over the coming couple of years. See graph below. Blue columns are data from Defra sources while yellow columns are modelled forward by Julia Aglionby.

Lack of access to ELM will be a major barrier to profitable upland farm businesses. This is predicted due to a mixture of the following factors:

• High demand for a limited budget
• Stop start nature of schemes being open then closed
• Common Land not having full access to all schemes
• Delays due to requirements for pre app surveys
• Shortage of NE staff to support applications
• Commons requiring consensus across all parties
• Gaps between schemes resulting in income shortfall

Commons ELM agreements take 18-24 months to prepare for due to the large area, large number of involved parties and the ambitious and multiple asks across a single site e.g. peat restoration, archaeology, woodland planting. If we allow gaps between ELM schemes it will be much harder to bring commons back into schemes as well as the financial hit to cash flow and farm profitability. 

The lack of access to ELM is unjust and inequitable. While Defra and the RPA are thankfully coming up with a trial solution for access to CSHT there is no commitment to enable access to SFI for common land. If SFI is enabled for common land then it is critical that the £100,000 cap is lifted as whole commons schemes are required and the cap would prevent commons over 1000 ha in size entering SFI. This is approximately the average size of a common’s agreement in legacy schemes.

4. How do legal protections for uplands areas (including designation as a National Park or Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty / Protected Landscape, and designations such as Site of Special Scientific Interest, or Special Area of Conservation) impact decision-making, land management, and outcomes?

Designation as a SSSI and or a SAC is an overriding matter in determining the land management decisions of landowners, tenants and commoners. This is particularly pertinent for the management of common land as 53% of all common land is designated as a SSSI compared with 8% of land across England.

The Foundation for Common Land in 2024 obtained a legal opinion from David Elvin KC as well as Michelmores solicitors. They were both clear that without SSSI consent from Natural England it would in most cases be unlawful for commoners to graze due to wording of the Operations Requiring Natural England Consent (ORNEC) meaning that the very act of grazing requires consent. On some commons the restrictions are a little less stringent and it is only changes in grazing levels that require consent.

The impact of this is that if a common exits an ELM scheme, or has a gap between the old HLS/UELS and a new CSHT schemes or cannot access a scheme due to lack of functionality / shortage of NE advisors to acess the pipeline, then it will be unlawful for any stock to be grazed without Natural England’s consent. It can take some time to obtain this consent and often it is given at the level required by the scheme, so commoners and owners of common land outwith ELM are in effect required to graze land according to scheme requirements but without the benefit of public money for public goods.

With regard designation as a Protected Landscape then 82% of common land is within a protected landscape. This is mostly a positive as protected landscape bodies are generally supportive as they have a statutory duty to support cultural heritage, economic well being, beauty and communities as well as nature and recreation. This integrated approach to land management is consistent with the wide range of outcomes common land offers.

5. What improvements are needed in land use data, mapping, and modelling to support effective decision-making in the uplands? What training or other skill development options are needed to support this?

There are plenty of excellent tools available to manipulate, layer and interrogate data e.g. MAGIC, Defra Open Source Data. We do though have concerns relating to the quality of the data available:

• has it been ground truthed?
• how granular and local is the data is? and
• how up to date ecological surveys and SSSI assessments are.

Regular monitoring of livestock and ecological data is essential to enable adaptive management and ensure ELM schemes deliver the outcomes they are paying for while securing a future for pastoral commoning and farming businesses. It was therefore most disappointing that Defra withdrew the SFI MOR1 action just as we were beginning to engage farmers to start collecting ecological data. Our view is that Defra should reintroduce this action but with enhanced requirements.

In 2022, The Foundation for Common Land with the support of Defra funding, developed a Moorland Survey phone app. This is now used on 194,000 ha of moorland for moorland farmers, commoners and owners to survey their moors using a phone app and so meet the requirements of the SFI CMOR1 action collecting baseline data on vegetation type and peat depth. Over 450 farmers and moorland managers have undertaken surveying with our tool. We work in a partnership with the LandApp which is a user friendly GIS platform for importing and organising data and it contains a huge number of data sets.

We undertake training for farmers in the field, online and with video and written documentation. We have also contributed to the University of Cumbria’s Mapping Environmental Assets course to support Land Managers and Commoners part of a series of CPD courses under the banner Uplands ELM.[2]

In addition to the basic data for SFI the Foundation for Common Land has developed a more in depth Farmer Led Habitat Assessment app – also farm based with accompanying booklets. Farmers have been trained to collected habitat data and this has been cross checked with ecologists undertaking a parallel survey. This partners well with SFIMOR1 and we are planning to further develop this tool but the likelihood of significant take up is low given the removal of SFI MOR1 action.

6. How might land use and business changes in the uplands impact rural communities?

ELM has the opportunity to catalyse rural communities, rural businesses and NGOs to deliver more for high quality food, nature, access to the countryside and to mitigate climate change.  Rural communities are at risk if ELM is not effectively rolled out as that income is lost to these communities to deliver public benefits and so underpin local economies.

Hope, work opportunities and strong local businesses and environments underpin well being. We know that suicide rates are high in isolated rural communities. Cumberland Unitary Authority for instance has the second highest suicide rate in England and Wales with 1 in 5 adults having attempted suicide.[3] 

Common Land agreements are particularly complex and the 3,900 commoners in England feel particularly abandoned by the Government despite commons offering so many benefits for people, places and the planet. There are two risks with no schemes – firstly that farmers simply stopping grazing common land as the costs outweigh the financial benefits, and secondly that farmers seek to farm their way out of the lack of schemes and stocking levels reach unsustainable levels causing damage to habitats undoing years of gain and wasting government funds.

The next two years will be an incredibly delicate time for the uplands and commons as schemes transition from HLS to CSHT. This will place huge stresses on upland farming families. The more Defra, Natural England and the Rural Payments Agency can do to improve their processes the better. This will require investment in administrative staff, technical advisors and computer systems. NE Advisers would also benefit from training in relating to and valuing the knowledge of hill farmers and commoners so schemes are co-created and deliver the outcomes sought.

Between 2023 and 2025 active policy engagement between Defra and the main bodies working on common land and with commoners was scaled back, aside from the Cottam Review team. Many of the current issues with ELM could have been avoided if government had listened and acted on the advice given. For instance, an active choice was made by Defra to not make schemes available on common land. Off-system processing has been used for commons agreements for 30 years then in 2026 Defra suddenly refused access for commons due to a new requirement for on-system processing. The total cohort of commons SBIs in legacy schemes is less than 300 customers so an off system approach is eminently practical and there are many staff in the RPA with the skills to undertake this work.

7. How can government policy ensure that rural communities in upland areas benefit from changes? 

Approximately half of all upland farmers are commoners. If we want the uplands to thrive then we need ELM schemes to function well on commons.  Currently ELM does not work on commons and it is only later this year that the RPA will have the functionality for common land to apply for CSHT. SFI schemes remain closed to common land with no timetable for addressing this.

Large areas of moorland remain ‘naked’ of any payments since the phase out of BPS. The financial data shared above is for the average farm and hides a significant spread around the average.

Our asks are:

1. Access to ELM: All common land can enter into all ELM schemes both SFI and CSHT as well as Landscape Recovery. The RPA is currently piloting a new process.
2. Capital Works: Currently all agreement holders have to not only undertake the works but defray the payment despite the grant covering 100% of costs. Given a commons association is not a business we ask that capital works can be paid for once the works have been completed but without the need for defrayal first.
3. Governance: The management of commons agreements requires firm and clear governance. There were satisfactory safeguards under legacy schemes. The current CSHT and SFI terms and conditions are, , too weak and allow abuse by certain commoners or landowners that obstruct good schemes.
4. Stocking Levels: For Natural England to work collaboratively with farmers and land managers to develop adaptive grazing that is suited to each place and to encourage pastoral grazing systems that deliver for nature, livestock and people based on both national research and robust place based evidence as well as local understanding of sites
5. Findings of the Cottam Review are rolled out at pace and scale across England’s Uplands and also in lowland commons. We suggest as well as the in depth implementation projects in Dartmoor and Cumbria the key findings are integrated into the mainstream ELM schemes.

June 2026