Tag: grants

Seismic Shifts

The world has changed dramatically over the past few years.  Only time will tell how far the tectonic plates have shifted and whether life will ever be the same again.  In the UK, the pressure has been felt particularly in the countryside and the food chain.

            The first seismic shock came in 2016 when we voted to leave the European Union, although the impact came later on our subsequent secession.  That meant that we left the Common Agricultural Policy and had to design a new farming and countryside policy from scratch.  This has been a very slow process and we still have few details other than that direct payments are being phased out and, instead, farmers will be paid public money for public goods.  This is the most fundamental shift in policy since the Second World War and will inevitably cause difficulties along the way.  Brexit brought major disruption to our trade with the EU, by far our largest trading partner.  Some of that disruption has been smoothed over but much of it remains.  Another impact of secession was the end of the free movement of labour, which caused huge shortages that persist today due to a totally misguided immigration policy.

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Grant Scheme

As the Environment Bill completes its parliamentary stages, the Government’s plans for the countryside are becoming clearer.  There have been numerous amendments debated; it is a large and critical piece of legislation as we are now free to set our own policies.   Ministers have resisted any legally binding targets for biodiversity but have agreed to ‘halt’ the decline in the abundance of species rather ‘further the objective of halting’.

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