Farmers will receive environmental subsidies under a new system to be introduced after Brexit, Defra secretary Michael Gove has announced.
Gove told delegates at the Oxford Farming Conference that the new payments would be used to reward farmers for planting wildflower meadows and woodland, boosting wildlife and improving water quality.
He has been a vocal critic of the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy and its Basic Payment Scheme (BPS), under whichfarmers are currently paid according to the amount of land they own.
The new system would replace current EU farming subsidies, worth £3 billion a year, as of 2024, five years after Brexit. The announcement follows sustained lobbying from the NFU for farmers to be given greater clarity on what will happen to subsidies after Britain leaves the EU.
In his speech at the conference, the Defra secretary set out how the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy and the Basic Payment Scheme (BPS) would be replaced after Brexit.
“After a transition, we will replace BPS with a system of public money for public goods,” Gove said. “The principal public good we will invest in is environmental enhancement.”
He added: “Paying landowners for the amount of agricultural land they have is unjust, inefficient and drives perverse outcomes. It gives the most from the public purse to those who have the most private wealth.”
Under Defra’s plans, a five-year transition period will be introduced to ease farmers into the new system, and landowners will be supported to make changes that protect the environment.
As a Leave campaigner, Gove has argued that leaving the EU will allow Britain to improve rather than weaken its environmental standards.
But according to The Guardian, several major conservation organisations, including the RSPB, National Trust and WWF, are concerned that existing protections enshrined in EU law could be removed after Brexit.
