England’s land is changing. How do we make the right choices?
England’s land is being asked to do more than ever. We need it to produce food, provide homes, restore nature, store carbon, generate energy, protect communities from flooding and heat, and support thriving local economies.
And over the next 20 years, we will need to change how a significant amount of that land is used if we are to meet our climate and nature commitments.
The scale of the challenge is increasingly well understood. What is less clear is how we make those changes happen, how we decide between competing demands, and who gets a say.
Those questions ran through CPRE’s centenary land use conference, Running Out: Facing the Crisis in Land Use, which brought together more than 100 people across planning, farming, government, academia and the environmental sector at UCL East last month.
Across three sessions, speakers approached the challenge from very different perspectives. But several themes kept returning.
We have frameworks, now we need to make them work together
There is no shortage of policy affecting England’s land.
The new Land Use Framework sits alongside upcoming Spatial Development Strategies, Local Nature Recovery Strategies, environmental targets, infrastructure plans, farming policy and a host of other national and local plans.
The challenge is how they connect. Our recent report suggests ways in which this could happen.
That became particularly clear during discussion of the relationship between the Land Use Framework and the new Spatial Development Strategies. The former considers the whole of England’s land and the multiple demands placed upon it. But it is not currently a ‘material consideration’ in local planning decisions (i.e. a factor that could seriously influence a planning decision). Spatial Development Strategies, meanwhile, could become powerful tools for bringing decisions about housing, infrastructure, nature and climate together, or they could end up primarily as mechanisms for allocating housing targets.
A recurring message throughout the day was that simply creating more plans will not deliver more integrated land use. The opportunity is to connect the tools we already have around a shared vision for places and the outcomes we need from them.
That could mean a National Spatial Framework for England, as proposed by the Royal Town Planning Institute. It could mean strengthening the role of the Land Use Framework in planning decisions. Several speakers also called for some form of land use commission or taskforce to provide coordination and continuity across government. It’s hoped that the government’s new ‘land use unit’ will help with this also.
The structures may differ, but the underlying point was consistent: land does not fit neatly within departmental or sector boundaries, and the way we govern it cannot afford to, either.
Better land use is a democratic challenge
‘Joined up land use’ sounds like a goal everyone can agree with – but when land is a finite resource, the reality is harder.
Decisions about how and where land is used inevitably involve trade-offs: between food and housing, development and nature, national priorities and local needs, and sometimes between different environmental goals. It’s not realistic to expect these trade-offs can be avoided, but joining up priorities and departments at least means that better, more informed decisions can be made.
But how we bring people into that conversation also matters. Communities are also part of that ‘join-up’. This was one of the most interesting threads running through the conference. Emma Pinchbeck of the Climate Change Committee argued that land use change is deeply local and needs a public conversation. Sue Pritchard of the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission challenged assumptions about ‘consultation fatigue’, suggesting that people will engage when they are invited into conversations that feel meaningful. Professor Mark Tewdwr Jones pointed to the tiny proportion of people currently involved in planning consultation.
The final session reinforced this theme. Carolyn McKenzie, drawing on Surrey’s experience, highlighted the importance of starting with a shared vision for a place, rather than individual competing demands. Dame Barbara Young stressed that land use decisions should be rooted in place, shaped by communities and include ways of resolving conflict.
So better land use is not only a technical challenge – it’s also a democratic one. If England’s landscapes are going to change significantly over the coming decades, people need to be involved in deciding what that change looks like.
Maps can show us where, but they can’t make change happen
Another theme was the gap between planning for change and delivering it.
Better data and spatial mapping can help us understand where land might deliver the greatest benefits. But, as Tom Curtis of 3Keel put it, knowing how we would like landscapes to change is different from understanding how they actually change.
Land use is shaped by ownership, markets, incentives, regulation and investment as much as by lines on a map.
Guy Shrubsole brought ownership directly into the conversation, pointing out that less than 1% of the population owns half of England and questioning what greater accountability from major landowners might look like.
Tom Curtis approached the issue from another direction, arguing that alongside the ‘cartography’ of future land use, we need an economic operating system capable of delivering it. Landscape Enterprise Networks offer one example, bringing businesses together to invest in the resilience of the landscapes on which they depend.
Helen Browning showed what integration can look like at farm level, where food production sits alongside forestry, climate adaptation, nature, health and animal welfare.
Together, these examples illustrate that planning policy can set the direction, but it cannot deliver land use change on its own. What happens on the ground is also shaped by ownership, incentives, investment and the relationships between those who own, manage, fund and depend on the land.
The environment is not the alternative to growth
Perhaps one of the most useful challenges of the day was to the familiar (but inaccurate) assumption that we must choose between economic growth and protecting the environment.
Carolyn McKenzie offered a different framing: the environment as the ‘first infrastructure’ of a place. Healthy soils, functioning ecosystems, clean water, green space and resilience to climate impacts are part of the infrastructure on which successful places and economies depend, rather than extras to be ‘added on’.
In Surrey, the council’s land management framework has been framed around helping to deliver its wider goals, manage risks and identify opportunities. The next step is to explore how that thinking can inform land use across the county and connect with its Spatial Development Strategy.
It is a useful shift in language, and also in thinking. Investing in the environment can be part of how we create places that work better and remain resilient in the long term.
From an ‘unfrozen moment’ to action
Several speakers described this as an ‘unfrozen moment’ for land use. There is a new Land Use Framework, strategic planning is returning and devolution is changing where decisions are made. New tools and better data are becoming available, while places across England are already experimenting with more integrated approaches.
But moments of opportunity do not stay open indefinitely. By the end of the conference, the question was less whether we need a more joined up approach to land use and more how we turn that ambition into decisions on the ground.
There are still gaps. How should decisions made nationally connect with what communities want for their places? How do we bring together land inside the planning system with the much larger area outside of it? Who provides coordination across government? And how do we build the skills and capacity needed to make integrated land use work?
There may not yet be one answer to those questions. But one conclusion from the day felt clear: we cannot meet the demands being placed on England’s land by considering each of them separately.
The opportunity now is to move from a collection of plans, frameworks and ambitions towards a shared vision for land, and the practical tools, investment and public involvement needed to deliver it.
You can view the full conference on our YouTube channel.
