My Lords, I start by begging the forgiveness of the noble Earl, Lord Devon. I feel a slight rat in that, having had his support of my immediately previous Amendment 14, I am going to speak against his Amendment 15, as well as Amendment 26 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering.
Farm businesses and farmers will be the primary recipients of payments for public goods, but the environmental land management scheme will be one of the main ways of delivering the objectives of the 25-year environment plan and should not be limited in scope to agricultural land and farmers. It must support wider land management and multi-objective uses of land, since we now have land needs in excess of the land we have. We will have to get land to work several times over for its living if we are to meet all these land use needs.
Farmers need to think of themselves as land managers in the future, delivering multiple objectives—food, obviously, but also carbon sequestration and storage, biodiversity management, water quality management, soil management, flood risk management and a whole bundle of access, recreation and human health benefits. We need to see that farmers of the future are not just going to be about farming for food but delivering those multiple objectives.
I will give a couple of examples of the sorts of thing that would be prevented if the payment restrictions were only to farmers. One is non-agricultural habitats like blanket bogs, which often occur in farm holdings but may not. They are pretty crucial to combating climate change, and they are cost-effective ways of improving water quality. I should declare an interest as chairman of the Woodland Trust: a second example is support for owners of non-commercial woodlands, such as community woodlands, to plant more trees in the interests of biodiversity, climate change and all sorts of other benefits that trees deliver, which ought to be embraced within the scope of these schemes. I cannot support Amendments 15 and 26.