IES Response to Land Use Consultation

Joseph Lewis

15 April 2025

IES Response to Land Use Consultation

The Government's Land Use Consultation closes in April 2025. Ahead of the deadline, the IES has published its full response, based on the views of IES members and stakeholders.

Read the full response on the IES website.

What does the consultation cover?

The consultation on land use in England sets out the new Government's vision for land use in England, with a view to land use changes implied by commitments across government policy and a range of other factors.

In particular, the consultation sets out the underlying principles and rationale behind the long-promised Land Use Framework for England, which will play a key role in managing trade-offs around the use of land for agriculture, biodiversity, energy, housing, and a range of other factors. For more information about the full potential of a multifunctional land use framework, read the August 2024 Land Use Framework briefing paper from the IES.

What are the key messages from the IES response?

The key message of the IES response highlights the importance of a holistic and transformative approach, as well as the vital opportunity represented by the Land Use Framework:

"The Land Use Framework provides a unique opportunity to pursue transformative change. Operating from the perspective of the whole land use system, it has the potential to reconcile agriculture, development, biodiversity, energy production, green spaces, and other uses of land, as well as the multiple potential benefits of land, including food security, energy, infrastructure and housing development, nature recovery, and human health and wellbeing. The opportunity to achieve these mutual benefits cannot be squandered, so the land use system must be approached from a holistic and transformative perspective."

The response also elaborates on several key points, which are borne out in more detail across the response:

Read the executive summary

The IES supports the Government’s ambition for a transformative approach to land use to deliver sustainable wellbeing and a country with thriving people, a healthy economy, and a flourishing environment. The Land Use Framework will be a fundamental feature of such an approach, as long as it is set up to deliver and provides the right incentives to do so.
Achieving a multifunctional approach in practice is crucial, because so many social, economic, and environmental outcomes can be achieved – or forfeited – through our approach to land use. Equally, it must be recognised that there are likely to be trade-offs, so a holistic, systemic, and strategic approach is necessary to determine what can realistically be achieved and to encourage effective action.
Currently, there are several areas where further information is required to know whether the Land Use Framework will deliver multifunctional social, economic, and environmental benefits. Details of how the Land Use Framework will work with other policies will be particularly important.
In particular, the assumptions and evidence underpinning the Analytical Annex are not sufficient to assess the scale and type of land use change needed. A longer timeframe should be embedded; deeper economic analysis of the land market and food production is required; a broader perspective of the environment would be beneficial; greater regional variance should be accommodated; and the qualitative evidence base should be more representative.
The Land Use Framework provides a substantial opportunity to address historic market failures in the land market, as well as the economic systems underpinning food production. This opportunity must be taken, so the Framework should address how farmers can be fairly incentivised to provide environmental benefits and how land use and the planning system can deliver appropriate multifunctional solutions.
Strategic planning should underpin any approach to land use to avoid future risks. This should be informed by a wide range of desirable outcomes, modelling of land and water systems, and planning against a range of future scenarios.
Even the best possible version of the Land Use Framework will rely on effective delivery on the ground, so resources and capacity must be available to delivery organisations, particularly local authorities.

For more information, read the full response.

Getting more involved in IES policy positions

The IES puts members at the heart of our approach to environmental policy engagement. Our response to the Land Use Consultation was based on input from an interdisciplinary working group with perspectives from academia, economics, land and water management, and from across the environmental sciences. The best way to find out about future opportunities to get involved is to join our member communities.

Catch up with the latest analysis from Essential Environment, covering implications of policy change for environmental professionals
Read the full IES response to the Land Use Consultation, or our briefing on the Land Use Framework
Find out more about IES policy priorities across the UK, or how to more effectively engage with environmental policy
Get in touch to find out more about our policy work: Joseph Lewis, IES Policy Lead (joseph@the-ies.org)

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