Reeves is right to slash funds for wealthy landowners

It is beginning to feel a bit like 1998 all over again. That was the year of the first countryside march when it – supposedly – rose up in anger at the Blair government over its plan to abolish hunting, introduce the right to roam and build some houses for people to live in. Landowning interests, already reeling from Rachel Reeves’ decision to partially remove the inheritance tax exemption on agricultural land, are now gearing up to bleat about a proposal to slash the £2.5 billion a year budget for Environmental Land Management (ELM) – the scheme which replaced the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) after Brexit. 

It is reported that the scheme will be designed to be less generous, with payments being retained only for small farms. The landowning interest will be expecting to whip up mass public anger again, just as it did for the countryside march. But what exactly are taxpayers getting in return for ELM payments?

The idea behind ELM was to come up with a more sensible scheme than CAP, which for the last two decades has been little more than welfare for landowners – it doles out billions to them simply for owning land and keeping it in the vague definition of ‘agricultural condition’.