Jill Rutter

So what it changed to being is a scheme which was basically income support for farmers, which took the form of what was called the basic payment scheme, where you owned land, might depend on whether

Your land was good for farming or less good for farming.

But if you own land, you've got a payment from the Common Agricultural Policy.

That budget was protected and national governments couldn't really touch it.

And that was the scheme that was operating until we left the EU.

And one of the things I think that really did unite a lot of people in the Brexit debate...

was that surely we could do better than the Common Agricultural Policy.

Farmers didn't like it.

They thought it tied them up in a whole morass of red tape, compliance conditions to get, in many cases, quite big and really important payment for a lot of their incomes.

But environmentalists noted that the decades of the Common Agricultural Policy

had seen destruction of lots of landscapes, had been really bad for lots of key environmental indicators.

So what then changed as a consequence of Brexit?

So as a consequence of Brexit, we took back control.

Each government in the UK took back control.

So it's a devolved matter.

The boldest reforms were when Michael Gove was Environment Secretary.

He made a speech in 2017 that set a new principle which said we're actually not going to pay you just for holding land anymore.

And the Michael Gove mantra was that we would pay public money for public goods.

Forget about income support.

What we'll support you to do is to do things that largely are good for the environment, but might also be good for heritage and things like that.