Source · Select Committees · Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee
Recommendation 2
2
Acknowledged
Paragraph: 16
Ringfence funding for long-term soil health monitoring and finalise indicators by December 2024.
Recommendation
The Government must ringfence the funding for the soil health monitoring programme to ensure a long-term commitment to this precious national resource. This funding should be on the same scale as funding for the monitoring of other critical assets such as water and air quality. The Government should also finalise the soil health indicators by December 2024 at the latest.
Government response summary AI-generated
The government encourages farmers to monitor their own soil health, noting existing SFI payments for soil assessment, and intends to publish further tools and guidance later this year to enable consistent data collection, but did not commit to ringfencing funding or finalising indicators by December 2024.
Summary of the government's response below — read the verbatim text to verify.
Paragraph Reference:
16
Government Response
Acknowledged
HM Government · verbatim extract
Acknowledged
Improving soil health is a priority for government. To achieve this, establishing robust baseline data is essential to monitoring changes over time. National soil monitoring is currently being undertaken within the tNCEA programme, yielding valuable new data to aid improved understanding of national soil condition. The tNCEA is a three-year programme, aided by substantial government investment (£140 million funding over three years for the whole NCEA programme, both tNCEA and marine NCEA). The tNCEA is setting up long-term monitoring capability at a national/regional level. National soil monitoring under the tNCEA Programme began in 2022. Up-to-date and comprehensive soils data is a priority of the programme. Provisional updates will be produced from 2024, with the immediate phase using current capital investment to achieve two years of the five years needed for a soil health baseline. The next phase of capital investment, needed to complete the baseline for soil health by 2028, will be included in Defra’s R&D Spending Review. ‘Soil health’ is one of the 66 indicators of environmental change in the Outcome Indicator Framework of the 25 Year Environment Plan. Defra will publish a progress report on the development of the indicator by June 2024. Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC) published a concept model in June 2023, and we intend to develop a more comprehensive model by 2025. The completed indicator will be published when sufficient data have been collected through the tNCEA programme. The indicator will use data currently being gathered on soil characteristics (physical, chemical and biological) and land use to show how different soils are contributing to different ecosystem services as a measure of soil health. Recommendation 2: By 2025, Defra should adapt the Environmental Land Management schemes to fund the testing and assessment of all key physical, chemical and biological soil attributes decided by the soil health indicators project. These schemes should only support tests that are easy to use, cost-effective, and meet an approved standard, to collect more robust and comparable data. This must involve working with industry on suitable tests and assessments and collaborating with supply chain assurance standards to ensure farmers need only produce data for one common set of soil health tests. The ELM schemes should incorporate mechanisms to feed publicly funded data back into the soil health monitoring programme. This data and analysis should be anonymised, aggregated, secured and not be used to monitor progress on individual farms.
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