Today (5 December 2023), on World Soil Day, the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee (EFRA) publishes the report to its inquiry into soil health.
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5804/cmselect/cmenvfru/245/report.html
Soil is vital to sustaining life on Earth, producing our food and sustaining rich ecosystems. Yet in recent years soil in the UK has become heavily degraded through over-use, erosion, compaction, or pollution. The EFRA Committee’s inquiry examined how the Government can turn the tide on soil degradation.
The Committee’s report calls for soil health to be put on the same footing as water and air quality within government policy, and calls for statutory targets on soil health, alongside the existing water and air quality targets, by 2028. This will need to be underpinned by data, agreed soil health indicators and widely accepted definitions of ‘sustainable soil management’.
The Committee emphasises that soil health monitoring must be on a continuous, ongoing basis, not a one-off event, and should be on the same scale as funding for the country’s other critical assets – water and air.
The report calls on the Government to fund the widespread, standardised testing of soil through its Environmental Land Management (ELM) schemes and to work with industry on an agreed set of metrics of soil health by 2024 as well as definitions of sustainable farming. The Committee also recommends that Government should aim ‘for nearly all farmers and growers (90% or more) to be part of an ELM scheme by 2040’.
The Committee calls on the Government to make sure that sustainable farming is profitable farming, by addressing unsustainable supply chain demands and critically by ensuring that the ELM schemes pay attractive rates for a wide range of ambitious soil-improvement measures.
While the report highlights the importance and the potential of ELMs to improve soil health, it points out that ELMs alone ‘cannot be the whole story’. The Committee recommends the introduction, by 2035, of a regulatory framework to focus on preventing soil degradation and contamination across various sectors, including construction and planning, as well as agriculture. With soil waste making up 58% of tonnage received by landfills, MPs recommend that these laws should aim to prevent soil waste ending up in landfill.
Dr Neil Hudson MP, Member of the EFRA Select Committee said,
Our far-reaching Inquiry on Soil health published today makes a clear set of recommendations to Government, so that soil health is recognised as being as important as air and water quality in terms of growing food and looking after our environment.”
“This natural capital needs to be protected and nurtured so that our food security and environmental stewardship is supported in the long term. From improving data collection and analysis, to recognising the importance of soil health in the Government’s Environmental Land Management Schemes, our Committee believes there is much we can do to boost the profile and our understanding of soil health.”
Further information:
Photo: Dr Neil Hudson MP at Rothamsted Research Institute, Hertfordshire, during the EFRA Soil Health Inquiry
- A copy of the report is attached to this email.
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5804/cmselect/cmenvfru/245/report.html
