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.
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.
Chair of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
Committee, Sir ,
said:
“Sustaining and restoring the country’s soil is essential for
our ability to grow food and protect this vital habitat. Threats
to soil health are in turn threats to our domestic food supply.
For too long soil has been treated differently to water and air,
but our Committee’s report says that it is about that time that
soil health is considered on an equal footing with these other
critical assets.
“Problems of soil degradation, contamination and soil waste
can be addressed through the use of sustainable soil management
practices and now is the time for the government to lead on
this.
“The Government’s ELM schemes are a good start, but we call
on the Government to make these schemes more ambitious, aiming to
get nearly all farmers involved and ensuring that they adopt a
variety of sustainable soil management practices across their
land. We also encourage the Government to use ELMs to fund the
collection of the data we desperately need to understand our
soils.
“It is not only farmers who have an impact on our soils, but
other actors in various sectors. Our report recommends that
Government introduces regulations to protect soils across
England, to ensure that everyone is playing their part in
protecting soil health.”
