Countryside stewardship agreements and planning conditions

A Countryside Stewardship agreement does not stop you getting planning permission, and planning permission does not release you from the agreement. That is the root of most stewardship agreement planning conflict: two separate contracts over the same field, each with its own map, its own term and its own enforcement route. The Rural Payments Agency polices one on Defra's behalf. Your local planning authority polices the other. Get the sequence wrong and you can find yourself repaying scheme money for a parcel you have just built on, or promising habitat work you are already being paid to do.

Two regimes making promises about the same land

An agri-environment agreement is a contract between the land manager and the Secretary of State. It attaches option codes to mapped land parcels and pays for actions carried out on them, with the parcel boundaries taken from your rural land registration. Countryside Stewardship worked this way, and the schemes that have sat alongside and replaced parts of it follow the same logic of coded actions over mapped areas.

Planning control works on a different axis. Conditions under section 70 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 attach to the permission. Obligations under section 106 attach to the land itself and bind successors in title. Neither regime reads the other's paperwork.

So the land can carry two sets of promises drawn on two different maps, held by two bodies that do not talk to each other about your holding. Nobody sends you a warning when they collide.

Where obligations conflict in practice

The commonest collision is the simplest. You put a building, a yard or an access track on a parcel that is entered into an option, and the area under that option shrinks. The agreement is then out of line with what is on the ground, which is a breach until it is corrected, and planning permission is no defence to it.

Access works cause the next tier of problems. A visibility splay at a field gate often needs a length of hedge reduced or removed, which sits badly with a hedgerow management option paid for on the basis that the hedge is cut on a rotation and allowed to thicken. Where the hedge is also an important hedgerow, you have a third consent to think about, and our note on hedgerow removal notices sets out that test.

Watercourse buffer strips are the third. Drainage from a new roof or yard has to go somewhere, and an outfall through a buffer option is both an engineering question and a scheme compliance question. Farm diversification schemes raise the same point whenever a barn is converted and the parking falls on cropped land, which is covered in our piece on workshops and offices on farm holdings.

Additionality and why it matters for net gain

Mandatory biodiversity net gain under the Environment Act 2021 applies to most major development from 12 February 2024 and most small sites from 2 April 2024. The scheme is a 10 per cent uplift measured with the statutory biodiversity metric, secured for 30 years, and set out in a biodiversity gain plan the local planning authority has to approve before development starts.

Here is the part that surprises farmers. The metric baseline is the habitat on the ground, so grassland you have already improved under a stewardship option is scored at its current condition. It has already delivered its gain to the scheme, and it cannot deliver that same gain again to the planning system.

Defra guidance also sets rules against double funding, meaning you cannot draw public money for an action and count the same action as your net gain. Check the current position before you build a strategy around it, because this is one of the parts of the regime that has been refined more than once. A Biodiversity Net Gain Assessment has to be prepared by a competent person under the Environment Act regime, and the biodiversity gain plan is approved by the council rather than by you, so treat any draft as a starting point for that person.

Term lengths and the mismatch with planning

Agreement terms and planning terms rarely line up, and the gap is where the risk sits.

Read your own agreement rather than the table. Terms vary by tier and by option, and some woodland and legacy agreements run far longer than five years.

The practical consequence is that a 30-year net gain commitment will outlive the agri-environment agreement sitting under it. Plan for the moment the scheme payments stop and the planning obligation carries on.

Evidencing existing agreements in an application

Councils will not know about your agreement unless you tell them, and an ecologist who does not know about it will mis-score the baseline. Put the following in front of the case officer at validation:

1. The agreement number, its start and end dates, and the tier or scheme name.
2. The option codes and the areas they cover, in hectares or metres of feature.
3. An agreement map extract showing parcel identifiers, overlaid on the red line and blue line of the application.
4. A short statement of which options the development affects and which it leaves alone.

The ecological survey should pick this up as a matter of course. A Preliminary Ecological Appraisal that records mapped options as part of the baseline saves an argument later, and the Planning Statement is the right place to set out how the two regimes are being reconciled. Where the development takes best and most versatile land out of production, an Agricultural Land Classification survey answers a separate policy question about soil quality, and the two pieces of evidence are often read together.

Amending an agreement to accommodate development

Ask the Rural Payments Agency about an amendment before you build, not after. Agreements have routes for changing mapped areas, removing land from the agreement or transferring it to a new occupier, and the request has to come from you.

Two sequencing errors cause most of the damage. The first is starting works in reliance on a permission while the agreement still shows an option over the footprint. The second is assuming the amendment can be processed inside the eight weeks a minor application takes, which is not a safe assumption for any scheme administration.

There is honest uncertainty about how long an amendment takes in any given year, and it depends on scheme and timing. Build slack into the programme rather than a fixed date.

Recording commitments so both regimes are satisfied

Keep one drawing that carries both sets of lines. Agreement options in one colour, planning obligations and conditioned habitat in another, with a schedule against each area saying which body enforces it, for how long, and who does the work. It sounds like housekeeping. It is the document that stops a future land agent, ecologist or buyer from selling the same hectare twice.

As an illustrative example, take a holding with a mid-tier agreement including a winter bird food option across two arable parcels, where the owner wants a 400 m2 building and a hardstanding on the corner of one parcel. The area under the option falls, so the agreement needs amending. The metric baseline for that corner is arable rather than the enhanced margin next to it, so the net gain has to come from somewhere the option does not already cover. And the new habitat, once secured for 30 years, cannot be re-entered into a scheme option that pays for the same action. Figures here are illustrative and not drawn from a real agreement.

This is general guidance rather than legal advice. Check your own agreement terms and the current scheme rules with the Rural Payments Agency, and check the planning position with your local planning authority or a qualified professional before relying on any of it.

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