Land, natural capital and the environment

Ben Goldsmith was appointed a non-executive director of DEFRA’s board in March 2018. Here, we ask him about the department, natural capital and all things environmental.

What is your role in the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA)?

As an informal adviser to the secretary of state, I have been particularly keen to make sure that voices not often heard in DEFRA have a say; for example, during the preparation of the Agriculture Bill.

Part of RICS’ role is about valuation. Based on the maxim ‘If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it,’ are we getting overly bogged down in valuing natural capital?

In a way I sympathise with the view that there is an intrinsic value to nature, which you can’t put a price on, and doing so somehow corrupts our relationship with it. Having said that, the country is moving towards environmental land management schemes (ELMS) in respect of rural payments, under which we will be paying land managers to provide services to the public according to the way they manage their land, so we will have to put an economic value on those services.

The other source of optimism is in respect of the great blank canvases that our less-productive agricultural land represent – the great marshes of the East of England and Dartmoor, those places where genuinely productive and profitable farming is just not possible.

I think farmers in those places can fare much better by diversifying, with the aim first and foremost of helping nature recover, and food production in those places being a by-product of that work. Active management, including grazing animals, is key to this, with farmers being rewarded by the taxpayer under ELMS.

In my opinion, environment secretary Michael Gove has been a bit weak on forestry. Where is the leadership in forestry on some of the more marginal pieces of land?

I hold with the theories of Professor Frans Vera, who challenges the notion that Europe and Great Britain were once a closed-canopy forest.

He says grazing animals had a much greater impact than we have assumed previously, and that wood pasture would have been the norm before agriculture. Human beings like glades, and the wildlife capturing our imagination today such as songbirds and butterflies exists at the woodland edge. An upland landscape of wooded pasture appeals to me.

Of course, we must have a commercial timber industry, but I would like it to be continuous-cover forestry with native species, and the commercial sector should be rewarded for the environmental benefits and landscape beauty that it provides. At the same time, let’s not renature the uplands with forests planted just for commercial production of wood.

Is there conflict between the various 2020 objectives for biodiversity and renewable energy, say in conserving upland bird populations in areas earmarked for wind farms?

Yes, such policies do sometimes conflict. For instance, elsewhere in the world, the use of oils produced in agriculture – including palm oil, or rapeseed oil as fuel for cars – is profoundly immoral because you are stripping the land of natural habitat or food for people. Smaller-scale biomass makes more sense: projects fed by local woodchip as a by-product from mills are great.

I would rather see solar panels on the roofs of warehouses – there are several thousand hectares of flat roofs in the South East of England alone that could be used for this – and solar photovoltaic cells in our roads as well, which is an interesting idea I have seen pioneered in France. I also think there is a role for offshore wind.

Has onshore wind more or less run its course?

Potentially, the best sites have been used up and political winds change; but it is about the availability of quality sites.

Do ecologists get in the way of good hydro schemes?

With hydro, the basic rule is about size. Small hydro has lower impact, whereas large-scale hydro dams can have a terribly negative impact by flooding communities, and are difficult to fix once they have silted up – though given the dire threats that we face from climate change, I would rather have large-scale hydro than coal.

How do you keep legislation at the gate, to enable innovation to flourish but trusting people not to overexploit? Might an environment watchdog’s teeth be too sharp?

The watchdog envisaged in the current Environment Bill would have the remit of holding government to account rather than individual farmers and businesspeople, and I do think, historically, the implementation of regulation in the countryside has perhaps been somewhat bureaucratic. There is scope for simplifying life for rural businesses – it doesn’t necessarily mean regulations should be weakened, but I do think the implementation of that regulation can perhaps be done in a more streamlined and simple way.

Thinking of the Oxford Farming and Oxford Real Farming Conferences, is there more room for the cross-fertilisation of ideas, including better-quality arguments?

I totally agree – there is so much to be learnt from each other. Those farmers farming profitably with lower inputs in the organic movement have knowledge that could help reduce inputs in conventional farming and vice versa. I believe in dialogue and sharing knowledge and information in moving to new ways of farming.

Do we require rural psychologists to help land managers and farmers make some tough transitions in remote areas of the UK?

The average income for small sheep farmers in the uplands is not fair, and the market is not working for them. I think we should assist them to diversify, and pay them for the environmental goods that many of them are already providing. I think they should be paid for the drystone walling, the hedges, pastures full of wildflowers and lots of things they love doing but are not being rewarded for, and encouraged to profit from the enormous number of visitors to those landscapes.

Should UK national parks become more like Yellowstone Park and charge?

No, because Yellowstone doesn’t have people living there. But maybe our parks could become more like Asturias in northern Spain, where thriving rural communities are being paid for the physical environment created by extensively grazed livestock and environmental services, such as guiding tourists. Every single farming family in one village I visited were doing B&B, supported by a special scheme providing tax breaks for their businesses. The landscape is slowly becoming more interesting, more colourful, more alive and it is working economically, socially and environmentally. Why not aspire to these examples in Europe that have more people, not fewer, than we have in our uplands?

If you were a large landowner, say a Dyson or a Buccleuch, what would your remit for your property adviser be?

It would be entirely different for each of them. As a lowland Dyson, I would push for innovation in my farming to increase productivity, becoming more responsible in having less impact on the environment. I would identify those places on my land where farming is not worth doing, and I would seek environmental services from the land by allowing nature to restore itself. There is space on every farm for a pond or a hedgerow or two and an uncut patch.

If I were a landowner in windswept Scotland, I would move away from a monoculture of red deer for stalking, seeking to make my landscape a more interesting model for visitors. It would still include hunting, fishing, shooting but it would also include birdwatching and hiking, cycling, kayaking and glamping. I would also be looking to be rewarded for reducing flooding and income from local authorities for public access. There is a whole bunch of different things we could look at to diversify into in a brave new world.

• Interview by Rob Yorke FRICS, a rural chartered surveyor and independent commentator. Image: Copyright Rob Yorke.
  

This article was originally published in RICS Land Journal (March/April 2019), titled Talking Land’s Language.