Today Defra has published a consultation on the new Land Use Framework for England which is an important first step for delivering much needed join-up between different land use related policies.
The Royal Society published its ‘Multifunctional Landscapes’ report in 2023 and one of the five recommendations was that to manage the competing demands on land: “UK countries should develop and coordinate spatially explicit national land use frameworks, to ensure coherence across different areas of land use policy and between national and local scales.” Therefore, the development of a Land Use Framework for England is welcome news.
The UK is currently overpromised in terms of the amount of land required to deliver current land-based policy priorities. Analysis presented in our Multifunctional Landscapes report suggests that by 2030, an additional area of land the size of Northern Ireland could be needed by 2030 to meet current policy targets for net zero and biodiversity. This rises to over twice the land area of Wales and 18% of total UK land area by 2050.
Policies with a particularly large land use demand include Net Zero 2030 and 2050 commitments, 30x30 biodiversity targets and the government’s current growth agenda which promises to relax planning rules for infrastructure related projects. This is alongside maintaining current levels of food production, reducing levels of environmental pollution and improving our resilience to extreme weather events such as flooding and drought.
It is therefore clear that in the UK, land will need to be optimised to deliver more than one policy objective per square metre – which we termed ‘multifunctionality’. To deliver this, joined-up policymaking will be required, between both different policies and between the different government departments that own these. A land use framework should be a route to achieving reconciliation, where land use decisions are no longer viewed as inherently binary and instead land is used strategically and, in an evidence-informed way, to deliver multiple benefits.
Optimising our land to efficiently and effectively deliver multiple benefits will not be straightforward. However, science has an important role to play in terms of offering modelling tools to help optimise land use decision making, along with providing the evidence on how best to manage land to deliver the range of benefits required.
A Land Use Framework for England is an excellent starting point, but we are under no illusions that this is just the beginning of a likely long and effortful process in terms of putting in place strategic and spatially explicit land use planning, that works on all scales from local to national, cuts across all government departments and is supported by evidence-based foundations such as a common evidence platform to collate science-based-inputs upon which to base decisions. In our multifunctional landscapes report we recommended that a framework should:
- Be supported by robust data and analytics.
- Be developed in a transparent way to build trust across multiple stakeholders.
- Enable policy coherence at the national level and reconcile competing commitments.
- Help to maximise returns on public investment in land-based activities as well as direct private green finance to where it is most needed.
- Allow space for political deliberation.
- Be spatially structured to facilitate decision-making at multiple geographic scales.
- Integrate housing and infrastructure with wider land use decisions
- Be flexible enough to evolve and improve as the evidence or policy needs change, and be in place long enough that individual land managers can use them to inform their own management and investment decisions.
- Be co-ordinated with similar frameworks in the devolved nations and use compatible methodologies.
- Be sufficiently influential to make a difference, with consistent political support at the highest level.
The draft Land Use Framework, released for consultation by Defra today has a strong commitment to robust data and analysis, and a spatially explicit and multifunctional approach. There is important recognition of the scale of change required and investment in skills and advice to support this. Indeed, most of the features outlined above are contained within the principles that Defra have proposed. Our scientists stand ready to help ensure that the new Framework is underpinned by the best possible science and data. We hope that the ambition outlined by Defra today becomes a tangible reality.
The Chair of our Multifunctional Landscapes report, Sir Charles Godfray FRS, has also responded to this announcement. Read the press release statement
