April 2025
If you time-travelled to 2050, would places you know today be recognisable? Would you understand the changes? Where and how will your food, water, energy and goods be produced, in that near future? As the UK Government consults on a Land Use Framework (LUF) for England, Plantlife asks that this new plan has a clearer focus on working with nature.
We see the need for a LUF to shape land use to 2050 and beyond. As well as new homes and infrastructure, we’ll need it in preparing for immense natural resource challenges: climate change, nature recovery, resource safeguarding, water and food systems, pollution and human health. An effective LUF can help us establish principles, mobilise data and inform decision-making on land use by farmers and foresters, planners and politicians, climate scientists and conservationists.
However, it’s important that the LUF reflects the breadth of its applications. Curiously, there is almost no mention of forestry or woodlands in the consultation, despite these being major land uses. Building houses and safeguarding prime arable land are important but they are not the whole land use story.
With so many competing pressures on England’s land, a multifunctional, land-sharing approach is essential. The LUF consultation document often refers to this, but goes on, less helpfully, to treat land use change as primarily a binary choice between food production and action for nature or climate.
We think the LUF should better capture the potential of land to deliver multiple benefits. Permanent grasslands, for example, cover 40% of England; true multi-taskers supporting food production, nature, clean air, flood risk reduction and climate action – given the right management. Plantlife and its partners are calling for a Government-led Grassland Taskforce, plugged into the LUF to make more of this national asset.
More broadly, action for nature and climate must be at the heart of the LUF – explicit in its core principles – if it is to support planning for genuinely sustainable land use. Ambitious targets for net zero and nature recovery must drive the LUF just as strongly as the government’s 1.5m housebuilding target.
Above all, the LUF can’t be developed in isolation, it needs to be meshed with the cogs in the land use gearbox – including the government’s recently promised Farming Roadmap, Food Strategy, planning reforms, Net Zero pathways and the review of the Environmental Improvement Plan. We call on government to ensure that the final LUF shows clearly how these initiatives develop together.
Plantlife welcomes the development of the LUF and will contribute to the conversation around it. We’re excited by the opportunities it offers for creating a joined-up plan for managing land, so that nature recovery can be delivered at scale and pace. The protection and restoration of species and habitats is a complex balancing act by land managers on the ground. The LUF can be the blueprint that links their actions together with the resourcing to make it happen. The consultation talks about the need to ‘play to the strength of the land’; to truly do this, the LUF must recognise that the land’s long-term strength is in its healthy, recovering natural ecosystems: including its plants, fungi, grasslands, and soils.
Read Link’s response to the Land Use Framework here.
The opinions expressed in this blog are the authors' and not necessarily those of the wider Link membership.
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