Defra currently without strategy, Efra committee chair warns

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alistair carmichael

Efra Committee chair Alistair Carmichael said the department was publishing ‘tactics before you have strategy’

Defra has introduced a number of initiatives since Labour was elected in 2024, but continues to lack an overarching food and farming strategy, Efra committee chair Alistair Carmichael has warned.

Speaking at a Commons Food, Environment and Rural Affairs Committee meeting this morning, Carmichael accused Defra permanent secretary Paul Kissack of publishing the “tactics before you have strategy” – pointing to policy updates on the Sustainable Farming Incentive, Minette Batters’ Farming Profitability Review and the Land Use Framework, before it had even published its long-awaited Farming Roadmap.

MPs challenged that the timing around the Farming Roadmap, which the government had promised to be “the most forward-looking plan for farming in our country’s history” when first announced in January 2025, and insisted it should have been published before the above documents, rather than last, as is currently planned.

“The point is it’s probably going to be the guts of two years into a five-year parliament before the department has come up with any sort of strategic direction for the industry, and in the meantime… tactics are being formulated without any idea of what the overall strategy is and what the industry is expecting of government,” Carmichael said.

However, Kissack responded by saying he did not accept Carmichael’s argument, adding the Farming Roadmap would be “the point at the end of the process where we pull it all together”.

“There is a choice to be made here, and it is a perfectly sensible choice to start setting out elements of the forward strategy and pulling the whole thing together into a single story later in the year,” he added. “I think it is a perfectly reasonable choice.”

Carmichael argued the department was “coming up with these various initiatives some of which connect up with each other, but you have got no overarching strategy, so you don’t know where they fit into the picture”.

Kissack maintained that the government did have a strategy, but Carmichael dismissed this as “an emerging strategy which you are late in publishing and that nobody has yet seen”.

The permanent secretary was also quizzed on perceived delays in core farming policies including the Land Use Framework, which was promised last year but is yet to be published. He said it was expected “very shortly”.

He explained that ministerial capacity was limited especially as they had gone from “a standing start in September” when the new secretary, Emma Reynolds, came in.

Kissack added the new ministers had made a set of “very deliberate decisions” about when documents were going to be published and had met those deadlines.

“I don’t think we have been hanging around,” said Kissack, who added that the delay to further detail on the updated SFI was a “conscious decision by ministers that, given what had happened earlier in the year, the last thing they wanted to do was rush out a scheme that might be wrong”.

The Labour government’s abrupt closure of the SFI prompted fury from the farming sector last spring. Former farming minister Daniel Zeichner announced a closure of the scheme in March 2025 following a “record number” of sign-ups, with “every penny” of the scheme’s £1.05bn budget having been allocated.

However, the short-notice move left many farming businesses out of pocket, while errors in Defra’s closure decision led to a partial reopening of the scheme to new applicants last summer.

An update had been promised from autumn 2025, but it was only unveiled at the NFU Conference last week.

Kissack explained trust had been lost in the scheme, which is why Defra would be communicating with farmers more thoroughly about how much of the budget was left.

“There will come a point when we do have to close the window, but we want to do that in an orderly way,” he explained.

He added that the department was also “working hand in glove with the Rural Payments Agency” so he was “fairly confident” Defra wouldn’t have a repeat.