In the last week of June, the UK broke its record for the hottest June day three days in a row. In London, where Climate Action Week had convened around a thousand events, the heat forced cancellations, including a session on extreme heat and how to govern for it. The venue, like most buildings in the city, has no cooling, and the Met Office had issued a red warning.
That same week, the Prime Minister announced his resignation, and Defra published a 25-year plan for the future of English farming: its delivery now rests with the fourth farming minister in two years. A single week exposed the gap between the futures our institutions plan for and the reality of today’s pressures. What stands between the two is a plan’s ability to endure through changes of minister, government, and public sentiment.
A plan with a distant horizon is not the same as a plan that’s built to reach it. What gives long-term plans staying power, do those that have just been made possess it, and will a new government make success more likely or less? In this article, I look at what’s missing and what we need to have do to have a better chance at staying the course.
Plenty of strategy, light on delivery
Within the space of a year, this government has published several long-term plans for food, farming, and land use.
Just over a year ago, government set out the 10 outcomes of its food strategy, encompassing health, resilience, and growth. The Ten Year Health Plan was launched a couple of weeks earlier, including many ambitions for the NHS specifically related to diet and nutrition. In March of this year, Defra published England’s first-ever Land Use Framework, promising a strategic approach to the competing demands on a finite resource, with visions for land use in 2030 and 2050 and a commitment to maintain domestic food production. The Farming Roadmap was published in June: a 25-year plan for English farming, billed by Defra as the “most significant moment for English agriculture since the Second World War”, promising the sector long-term stability, which it has spent years asking for.
A consistent complaint of food and farming policy has been that it’s too short-term, driven by electoral cycles, rather than dealing with long-term issues related to soil health, diet-related disease, and climate change that take decades to address. Now almost one year on from the initial launch of the food strategy, progress has been made at the strategic level, as evidenced by the Health Plan, Land Use Framework, and Farming Roadmap.
But close observers note that delivery on the strategy has been “underwhelming”, with very few concrete policies reaching communities. So while there are now several long-term plans in place, the question remains: are they sufficient to withstand the political climate they face?
The Farming Roadmap: Three readings
The Farming Roadmap is a clear test of that question. Its reception in recent commentary makes it clear that while there’s agreement on the key interventions, there isn’t on what they mean in practice.
Unquestionably, public funding has been repositioned as a transition tool rather than a permanent support mechanism, while continuing support isi promised for public goods that markets cannot fund. Private finance has moved from the periphery to the centre of how farming is meant to be funded. Money will be targeted where it delivers most, rather than spread thinly. And government has recast its role in the process, from grant provider to market shaper.
Yet the broader implications are disputed. One reading is that we finally have coherence, with separate agendas on food, nature, climate, and land pulled into a single programme, and a clear-if-demanding logic for who gets funded and why. A second reading is that it is a managed retreat for government funding, with support being withdrawn just as new schemes were gaining ground, with the cost passed to private markets that show no current evidence of being able to fill the gap, and a broken promise stretching back to Michael Gove of ensuring public money for public goods.
A third reading credits the plan with genuine courage in ending area-based payments that hid the sector’s vulnerabilities, yet notes that the tools the plan’s implementation depends on, from a spatial targeting framework to a green finance strategy, are still under development. But even the warmest readings, from those who see their own long-argued case finally reflected in government language, conclude with unease: a 25-year plan ought to command cross-party consensus, and there is little sign that this one does.
Which of these readings proves right will matter less, in the end, than whether the plan lasts long enough to settle the argument. A plan with this much open to interpretation will inevitably be defined by how it is implemented and by whom, rather than by what it says.
How to build a plan that lasts
What gives a plan long-term durability? Two reasons stand out: a strong standing in law, and its ownership by the people who deliver it. The most durable plans have both.
The Climate Change Act: A legal duty
The closest thing the UK has to a durable long-term plan is the Climate Change Act. A prime reason for this is that it put carbon targets into law, created an independent committee to report on progress, and placed a legal duty on ministers to meet the targets. It’s worked for nearly 18 years, under 7 (now 8) prime ministers. What the legal duty could not do is keep the consensus that enabled it alive. Yet while it is now under strain with Reform having pledged to scrap the targets and the Conservatives jettisoning the 2050 goal, the legal duty has made the commitment difficult to abandon: undoing it requires a parliamentary majority to amend or repeal it, and would carry a substantial political cost.
Significantly, nothing established in this year for food, farming, or land use has even a first layer of legal protection. Roadmaps, plans, and strategies lack legal force and can be easily discarded. Meanwhile, delivery of the Roadmap relies on a ministerial post that has changed hands three times in two years, within a department whose secretaries of state have averaged 12 months in post over the past decade. One year into developing the food strategy, observers noted that the incumbent minister may just be treading water until the reshuffle. Plans can lose a year of work under these circumstances, without a single decision being taken.
When plans have ownership
There’s another reason why plans last: they survive best when the people carrying them out consider them their own. However, English farming policy has mostly been decided in Westminster, with payments administered nationally, and farmers represented through national lobbies.
But there are signs of change. The Land Use Framework is deliberately a framework rather than a plan, on the view that Whitehall should not fix how land is used decades ahead. Instead, a pilot is underway following the recommendation in the Uplands Review that decisions and funding should reflect specific places. Several local and combined authorities now involve farmers directly in policy-making, and farmer groups are coordinating food production and environmental work across tens of thousands of hectares.
At Groundswell this summer, the climate minister—indeed the first non-Defra minister to ever attend the event—suggested that extending devolution to food and farming could help the country cope with shocks. A plan with many owners is harder to abandon than a plan owned by one minister.
Two approaches to durability, working together
These two approaches are sometimes presented as alternatives: coordinate from the centre, or hand power outward. They are better understood as complements, or layers, as demonstrated by the Climate Change Act. Its targets are national law, but meeting them depends on decisions made far beyond Westminster, and its current difficulties show that law without broad ownership is fragile, just as local effort without national commitment is piecemeal. A plan built to reach 2050 would plausibly need both: obligations that survive a reshuffle, and enough ownership among farmers, councils, and communities that abandoning it would carry a real political cost.
Continuity and commitment are not guaranteed by any of our current food system plans. The transition now underway will be yet another opportunity to see if anything about that changes.
The Burnham test
It may be that the new government’s instincts align well with existing food and farming plans. Andy Burnham identified food and farming among the critical sectors in his first major speech since returning to Parliament as an MP, alongside steel, energy, and defence. His stated approach of good growth in every postcode, delivered through faster devolution, is directionally similar to the Land Use Framework’s local turn and the place-based experiments already underway.
Burnham’s former adviser on Greater Manchester’s economic strategy has publicly urged him to rebuild exactly the kind of cross-government delivery structure that is currently absent in food policy. A new prime minister’s first few months are the widest policy window British politics offers. This is precisely the moment to do something big on food.
There is an equally plausible case for drift. Burnham has committed to governing on the 2024 manifesto, which had little to say about food. And pressures that crowded out a focus on the missions established early in Starmer’s government—including the NHS, the border, the cost of living—remain regardless of the change in PM.
The coming months
The Climate Change Act’s current difficulties offer a lesson. One of the best-protected long-term commitments in British policy is now under strain because political agreement has weakened, rather than through any fundamental design failure.
What’s needed now for food is twofold. Government can give these plans force through law, delivery structures, and budget allocations. Those outside government can make them harder to abandon, too, through a sector that treats these plans as their own, and communities with real ownership in decisions about land and food. England now has a set of long-term plans. The next few months will show whether the plans in place will survive the months and years ahead.
I write about the future of food and the connections between our food systems, the environment and public health. Sign up for my newsletter.
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