TFA Blog #365 – How can MPs Help as they contemplate policy for the uplands?

Uplands are working, food-producing landscapes

MPs on the House of Commons Environment Food and Rural Affairs Committee have launched a timely Inquiry looking into public policy for upland farms and landscapes. England’s uplands are too often discussed as if they were empty landscapes waiting to be optimised by policy. However, they need to be seen as working places, cultural places and food-producing places, shaped by generations of farmers who understand every slope, peat bog, rushy corner, watercourse, and weather patterns in ways no desktop review can capture. If the future of the uplands is to be sustainable, Government must stop treating upland farmers as delivery agents for someone else’s environmental ambition and start treating them as the essential partners they are.

Environmental Land Management Schemes are too rigid for upland diversity

Whilst new DEFRA Environmental Land Management Schemes are intended to reward farmers and land managers for delivering public goods alongside food production, they have been designed too rigidly against the diversity of the uplands. Upland farming cannot be standardised. A hill farm in Cumbria, a common on Dartmoor, a North Pennines sheep system and a mixed upland holding on the edge of a National Park may all be characterised as upland, but they are all very different. Stocking rates, grazing patterns, cattle use, heather management, peat condition, public access, tenancy terms and common rights vary enormously. A rule that looks tidy from Whitehall can be damaging on the fell.

Why blanket destocking harms upland habitats

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the debate over grazing. Too much grazing can harm habitats, but too little grazing can be just as destructive. Blanket destocking risks rank vegetation, invasive species, heavier fuel loads and the loss of the very biodiversity that sensitive grazing can support. It also threatens stratified sheep systems and hardy hill breeds developed over generations. Once breeding structures are broken, they are not easily rebuilt. The idea that environmental gain automatically follows stock reduction is dangerously simplistic.

Tenant farmers need security to enter environmental agreements

In addition, many tenant farmers do not have the security, legal clarity or bargaining power needed to enter long environmental agreements with confidence. Landlords, estates and institutional owners may have objectives that do not always align with the people actively farming the land. If public money is intended to buy environmental outcomes, it must reach those doing the management, not be captured by ownership structures that leave working farmers carrying the risk.

Upland commons are being left behind by scheme design

Upland commons are among England’s most environmentally significant and culturally distinctive landscapes, yet shared grazing rights, collective decision-making and complex administration make them awkward for schemes designed around neat business units. When scheme systems cannot accommodate commons properly, the result is not just bureaucratic inconvenience; it is exclusion from support, weakened confidence and poorer outcomes for nature, food and communities.

Food security must return to the centre of upland policy

Food security must be put back at the centre of the conversation. This does not mean ignoring environmental needs, it means recognising that the best upland policy will integrate these objectives with viable livestock businesses. A landscape that stores carbon but loses its farmers, skills, auction marts, contractors, schools, churches and young families is not a success story. It is managed decline dressed up as environmental progress.

Policy must be grounded in local, practical knowledge

The uplands have a crucial role in restoring nature, holding water, reducing flood risk, managing peat, supporting wildlife and adapting to climate change. But ambition must be grounded. Data, mapping and modelling can help, but they must be tested against local knowledge. Officials and advisers need to walk the ground with farmers before designing prescriptions for it.

Let’s hope the MPs on the House of Commons Committee can take a ground up approach to their work to be able to point DEFRA in the right direction. The uplands should not become a policy experiment. Policy must be developed by taking into consideration the practical knowledge of people who have managed these landscapes through bad winters, disease outbreaks, market shocks and changing policy whims.

This blog was written by George Dunn, Chief Executive, Tenant Farmers Association on 26 June 2026.

Related articles:

TFA Blog #362 – TFA Responds to DEFRA’s Dartmoor Pony Announcement: “An Urgent Rethink is Necessary”

TFA News article – DEFRA Looks Long-term for Farming and Land Use in England (April March 2026)

Fursdon Review – Independent review of protected site management on Dartmoor

TFA Media Release MR23/11 – Natural England Must Halt Assault on Grazing until Dartmoor Review Process Completed

Watch On Demand – TFA Webinar: The Dartmoor Review: Conclusions and Impact for Other Protected Sites

Watch on Demand – TFA Webinar: National Trust & Tenant Farmers: Balancing Farming, Nature Recovery and Tenant Livelihoods

Further Resources from the TFA:

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