Protecting hedgerows: share your views

Hedgerows retailer carbon, assist crop pollinators, create habitats for animals, gradual water movement and create shade and fodder for animals. These are only a few of their advantages. 

They’re an important characteristic of the English countryside. 

We need to shield the hedges we’ve got, spend money on their upkeep and assist additional planting. 

We additionally need to guarantee that hedgerow rules work for wildlife, the atmosphere and farmers.

Within the Environmental Enchancment Plan, we set out our dedication to assist farmers to create or restore 30,000 miles of hedgerows by 2037 and 45,000 miles of hedgerows by 2050. 

Right this moment we launched a session on hedgerow protections in England and we wish your views. 

Background

We need to protect and shield hedgerows by efficient, proportionate regulation whereas working in partnership with trade to ship our environmental targets.

The session focuses on home rules for hedgerow protections, as that is an space the place we don’t but have home laws. 

Along with the protections discovered below the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, laws exists across the elimination of hedgerows in The Hedgerows Laws 1997. It doesn’t, nevertheless, cowl their administration.

In the mean time, farmers should not take away vital hedgerows. They have to preserve a buffer strip alongside their hedgerows and should not minimize or trim hedgerows throughout fowl nesting and rearing season — for the nice of the hedgerow and the wildlife it helps. 

The session

The session focuses on sustaining and bettering current protections in addition to our enforcement strategy.

The session seeks suggestions on our proposal to amend current legislation to incorporate the next administration measures:

Having a ‘buffer strip’ 2 metres from the centre of a hedgerow to guard its construction
Not reducing hedgerows throughout fowl nesting season to guard vital fowl species

We need to know the place you suppose we might focus our ambitions for future hedgerow protections.

Lastly, we’d like your opinion on a proposal to introduce civil sanctions for the administration of hedgerows.

We wish everybody who cares about hedgerows to reply: from farmers to stakeholder organisations to members of the general public.

The session opened at present. It will likely be open for 12 weeks. It’ll shut Wednesday 20 September 2023 at 23:59pm.

This session is designed to assist us form what our necessities ought to be and we’ll weblog with updates.

Learn the session doc and share your views

Hedgerows and environmental land administration 

We’re ensuring that our environmental land administration schemes recognise the significance of hedgerows. 

By means of Countryside Stewardship, we already pay for the administration of hedgerows by rotational reducing, leaving some hedgerows uncut and restorative pruning of fruit timber.  

There are at present over 49,000 miles of hedgerows with one, or either side managed below Countryside or Environmental Stewardship choices. 8,450 miles of hedgerows have both been created or restored by Countryside Stewardship capital grants. 

This 12 months, we are going to introduce new Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) actions for hedgerows. 

Actions embody assessing and recording the situation of hedgerows, sustaining current hedgerow timber and establishing new ones.

The actions goal to assist farmers in managing hedgerows to supply year-round meals, shelter and breeding cowl for wildlife. 

The steering contains what land is eligible for every motion and what that you must do to receives a commission. 

Along with our environmental land administration schemes, progressive finance schemes for hedges are progressing with funding from Defra.

For instance, by the Pure Surroundings Funding Readiness Fund, we funded the Allerton Analysis and Academic Belief to create a carbon calculation device for hedges, as a foundation for a brand new carbon code for hedgerows. It will assist hedgerow planting and upkeep. 

We’re additionally partnering with the British Requirements Establishment to ascertain a typical framework to control nature market requirements just like the carbon calculation device. Doing so will assist us to guarantee that new codes like this one ship for nature and implement the ideas underpinning the Nature Markets Framework.