Podcast: What do we want from our land?

England's land is under increasing pressure. It must support food production, housing, renewable energy, biodiversity recovery and climate resilience, all while meeting the needs of a growing population.

To help balance these competing demands, the government has introduced a new Land Use Framework: a long-term plan intended to guide how land across England is used in the decades ahead.

Having contributed to the framework's consultation Christopher Bishop, Dr Isabella Butnar and Dr Abbie Chapman discuss what the framework means in practice, the opportunities and trade-offs it presents, and the challenges of creating landscapes that work for people, nature and the climate.

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Transcript

Voiceover:

This is a podcast from the Bartlett Review sharing new ideas and disruptive thinking for the built environment, brought to you by the Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment at University College London.

Isabela Butnar:

We are starting, not talking about food security, but about nutrition security. Can we meet the nutrition needs with fruits and vegetables cultivated in the UK as opposed to relying on imported food?

Christopher Bishop:

It doesn't answer some of those fundamental questions that we at ISR have been asking for a while, particularly around the dietary debate and the amount of land that is used for animal feed or animal grazing that could potentially be freed up for a number of other uses.

Abbie Chapman:

I'm not sure on the how of this. I don't know how people can make sure that they are producing multifunctional, multi-benefit landscapes on their doorsteps. How do they get started?

Christopher Bishop:

Hello, I'm Chris Bishop, a PhD researcher at UCL's Bartlett School Institute for Sustainable Resources. I led our institute's response to the government's Land Use Framework consultation in 2025 with the final framework publication published in March 2026.

So, before we start, try and picture this. Imagine you're a farmer in Norfolk growing wheat or cereal crops and a solar developer is at your door. You have lots of nature recovery targets to meet, several environmental land management schemes that you could join, all combined with increasingly extreme weather and uncertain geopolitical conditions to contend with and the government telling you that this all somehow fits together. Now the question is, does it? So, England's land is a finite pressured national asset.

Around 70% is used for agriculture, yet some of the land must deliver housing, infrastructure, energy security, food production, climate resilience, biodiversity recovery, and public access. In one of Europe's most densely populated countries managing these competing demands is a defining policy challenge of our time.

The key question isn't how much land we have because we know there's enough land to meet a range of government goals, but how effectively we use it. The right land used in the right way, in the right place for farming, wildlife, housing, or industry, while safeguarding long-term resilience.

That's why the government turned to experts across many fields, including UCL's Bartlett School to shape its land use framework. Over the next half an hour with two excellent colleagues, I hope to set out what we think are the key issues and whether the new framework addresses them satisfactorily.

So I'm really pleased to be joined here in the studio by Dr Isabela Butnar. Isabela is a multidisciplinary researcher specialising in environmental and policy aspects of climate change mitigation, carbon dioxide removals and lifecycle analysis. Isabela also currently serves as our ISR policy engagement lead. Welcome, Isabela.

Isabela Butnar:

Hello. Nice to be here.

Christopher Bishop:

And joining us remotely is another UCL colleague, Dr Abbie Chapman, whose research considers biodiversity and terrestrial freshwater and marine environments with common themes of spatial analysis, environmental impact assessment and sustainable development. She is based in the Centre for Biodiversity and Environmental Research and remains active in ISR. Thank you for joining us today, Abbie.

Abbie Chapman:

Thank you very much for having me, Chris. Great to be here.

Christopher Bishop:

So, I've touched on a very broad description of what the Land Use Framework is, but just to add a little bit more detail, the Land Use Framework sets out a vision for 2030 and 2050 as to what land in England could look like, setting out four principles for government decision making and how national and local spatial planning will be joined up.

What it is not doing, however, is telling anyone what to do with their land. So I want to start our discussion today by asking Isabella, why did UCL and the Bartlett provide a response to the Land Use Framework consultation?

Isabela Butnar:

Thank you, Chris. Before I answer that question, I should give a little background to what the Institute for Sustainable Resources at the Bartlett does. And we are a multidisciplinary team investigating sustainable, resilient, and equitable net zero futures. So, that means that we have researchers who look at critical mineral availability to food production, not only in the UK but also abroad all the way to people looking at transitions in the bigger energy system and what do we need to do and when to reach net zero.

So, the land use framework consultation was actually a great opportunity for us to pull together all our diverse expertise to answer some government questions. And for us, it was bringing it all down to the unit, seeing land as a primary resource. So it's not about how many tonnes of carbon dioxide we reduce or remove or how many tonnes of food we produce, but it's about how do we produce those?

Do we have enough land? And if we want to use the land differently, how do we prioritise what we use it for? So, what we recommended is that the government looks at this in a joint response across all government departments and also through different levels of governance from national to local and to farm level. And we recommended exploring some other scenarios of reduced demand for food and energy. So there is not that much pressure on land.

Christopher Bishop:

That's great. I think an important point on that as well, as you set out, is the government has got a range of environmental targets to meet some of which are statutory, some aren't, and it's committed to a lot more targets, particularly on house building, on economic growth. And there is a big question around how do you do that? Now that the framework has been published, what does it say about the sort of scale of change and what's changed since the consultation has been published?

Abbie, do you want to pick that up?

Abbie Chapman:

Yeah, I think what I saw as a really positive thing, Chris and Isabela, about it actually was how much had been taken on board in the framework report after the consultation period. So there were things, like we mentioned, a need for taking a multifunctional approach to land use on desperately needing more data, more transparency in data and more spatialised data.

So, it's all well and good knowing kind of how many different land uses we have in an area, but if you don't know where they are, it's really hard to know if they're overlapping. So I'd say there were some really positive sort of things that had been taken from all the people that contributed to that response, not just ISR, but there were clear sort of messages from our consultation response in there, which I thought was a really nice thing. There are some bits we've missed, but maybe we'll talk about that later.

I think there's still some things that need to be addressed, but it was really nice to see them referring to biodiversity as a core part of that multifunctional land use. They brought in things like nature-based solutions. They mentioned that explicitly now in the report, whereas I don't think that was there the first time. So it sort of highlighted why it could be really good for institutes like ISR to come in and actually provide evidence based on our experience of modelling these things, mapping these things, knowing what we wish we knew, knowing which data we wish we had and being able to share that so that then hopefully government resources can be put into getting us that information for the future

Isabela Butnar:

Just to add to that as well, another really positive thing is to see a first move from the government to bring in new powers to link the national decision making to the local decision making. I think that was really missing and it's a welcome step from the government. How that will work and when it will be implemented, it's a different question, but at least they do realise it was really disconnected and national to local. So that is coming through nicely.

Christopher Bishop:

Definitely. I think one of the interesting changes from the consultation to the published framework is also around this scale of change. So the original consultation set out that there might need to be approximately 19% of agricultural land changing in England and that's now dropped to 13% across the categories in which they've laid out. However, I think what's interesting is that we pointed out within our consultation response that that relied on some pretty unreliable assumptions potentially, particularly involving productivity of agricultural output and the continuation of that trend, which particularly in the light of climate change and in the last few years, we've seen a number of extreme events which are particularly hitting agricultural output and that's set to continue.

Abbie Chapman:

I noticed that there was this reference to kind of this big part of the land use that was kind of being excused from the framework and it related a lot to agricultural land use, which is a leading driver of biodiversity loss and the government has commitments nationally, but also internationally to prevent further biodiversity loss. So I wanted to ask you  how does it fit when we understand these need to be multifunctional landscapes and yet as you say, like the amount of land use being considered is being reduced?

Christopher Bishop:

Yeah, I think that's a really good question and certainly something which a number of responses pointed out within the consultation was that the categories in which they set out in the consultation, they were excluding quite a big proportion of land from existing kind of agricultural practises that they weren't particularly looking at. Instead were looking at land that was going to be changed towards climate and nature benefits towards potentially urban development towards renewables, but the way in which land is farmed without introducing kind of these things wasn't necessarily in scope for the framework. I think that fits with the messaging that the government's trying to promote around not telling people kind of how to do things with their land or what to do, but to provide options

So, I can understand the thinking, but it does leave out a large proportion of land which potentially further options could be utilised on.

Abbie Chapman:

Thank you.

Christopher Bishop:

Now in terms of what we think it got wrong, we mentioned that there are some of the assumptions we think are potentially unrealistic. Were there any other points that either yourself, Abbie, or Isabela, you thought actually it didn't address this?

Isabela Butnar:

I was looking to find out how much land will be reserved for trip planting for carbon dioxide removal or for other nature based solutions and removals. There is very little mention of it. Biomass is mentioned once and we know we want to increase the amount of biomass to fuel decarbonisation and removals, but it's completely absent. Who will be delivering that? Are the farmers willing to do so? Are there any plans to incentivise them?

So all of that is outside for now of the framework.

Christopher Bishop:

Yeah. I think that's a good point in terms of that seemed to be one thing that was missing was that it presented one single potentially optimistic scenario of what the land use change looked like, isn't potentially the most robust way to kind of inform some decision making moving forwards, particularly taking into account the uncertainty around net zero pathways and climate change as well as the assumptions on agriculture output moving forwards.

Abbie, anything you want to add?

Abbie Chapman:

You actually just hit one of the things I was going to raise there. So, we did suggest that they looked at scenarios. I think, to start with the very basic as well, at the very basic level, I think you have maps in the report, which is brilliant. I'm really pleased to see them there, but if you don't overlay them, you don't know who is trading off with who. And what I mean by that is something that scenarios enable you to see: where those trade-offs are between uses for people, uses for nature, whether those can be used together, what different futures can look like, and what the consequences are of those different futures for both people and nature.

One of the key scenarios you could consider that we did mention, but I don't think made it to the report. I might have missed it. It came from sort of colleagues work as well as some research I've been doing with Carol Dolan. So Henry Ferguson-Gow and Richard Pearson among others for the Sustainable and Healthy Food Systems project. They've got a paper out that basically talks about how if we work to move land away from meat production and reduce grazing land in the UK, you'd free up land for nature, but you'd also benefit human health and wellbeing goals that the government have. So you could meet your five a day for fruit and vegetables. You could ensure more sort of homegrown food security as well, because we actually rely an awful lot on imports for our fruit and vegetables supply in this country.

Perhaps that would be something I'd highlight as missing and something that needs to be discussed as this programme moves forward.

Christopher Bishop:

I agree with you, Abbie. It's very useful that they're starting to move in this sort of space to inform decisions, but I agree it doesn't answer some of those fundamental questions that we, at ISR, have been asking for a while, particularly around the dietary debate and the amount of land that is used for animal feed or animal grazing that could potentially be freed up for a number of other uses.

Isabela Butnar:

And, something else came to my mind which is also quite missing from this first version of the strategy and it's like even so it is great to have all this information and make it fully available. We welcome that, but then how do you prioritise the multifunction?

Is it just meeting energy and housing enough or do you want it to deliver resilience adaptation to climate change and other goals? So those discussions need to happen and they need to hop on quite soon if we want to deliver on time because unfortunately, everything is moving fast and we see the effect of climate change already affecting land and cities.

Abbie Chapman:

And we have commitments for 2030. I noticed they said they're going to review the framework every five years, which is great. It's something actually we recommended, but unfortunately that takes us to 2031 by the time this is next reviewed and we're already past deadlines for biodiversity and for many other things too, many climate goals. So if we've got to conserve the nature of 30% of land and water by 2030, as well as meet what we need for food under future climate change, we haven't got those four or five years. We need to be making the changes now. And as you say, how do we do that?

Christopher Bishop:

There wasn't particularly any mention as to how they might go about developing such a process to understand what the synergies and trade-offs between the different goals actually are. That still seems to be quite a big gap that's remaining from the consultation.

Abbie Chapman:

I also worry about whether it's helpful if they can provide landowners with more information on the how. So I really loved how ambitious the framework report is. It's like a real idealised future and I'm reading all these things that are their aims. I'm like, yes, this is exactly what we want in some areas.

I'm not sure on the how of this. I don't know how people can make sure that they are producing multifunctional, multi-benefit landscapes on their doorsteps. How do they get started? I don't know if there was enough advice on that because we've got nice data, nice ideas for the future, but how do we get there, and how do we get there fast?

Christopher Bishop:

I think that's a very good point, Abbie. And that's something that my PhD researcher is trying to touch upon, particularly in terms of the interviews that I've been doing with civil servants, landowners and farmers to understand really how land use policy is made, but also then how do landowners and farmers interact with land use policy to make some of these decisions as to what's best for their land?

Also, there's training and skills that need to be undertaken to actually analyse the data, or to have that available through different organisations who can advise landowners and farmers as to, okay, well now we have this data.

These are the different options as to what could be utilised, or most profitable, or most output for your land. But then also, as you mentioned earlier, Isabela, there's a lot of choice for landowners to really go through and try and consider.

So, using this evidence in a more informed way to understand, okay, you have this type of soil type or land area, these are the potential options which would be most profitable for your land, is certainly where we want to go. But again, it's that question of how quickly can some of this be rolled out.

And there are certainly some organisations, such as the Land App and others, that are trying to do this in a much more spatial way and bring data together, but it still needs to be kind of scaled up, and particularly fast if we want to meet some of these targets.

Abbie Chapman:

I mean, if I was a farmer looking at this, I'd be thinking, well, what do I even do with all these maps? How do I do this? I just want to do the right thing. I mean, you watch Clarkson's Farm, for instance, and I know Jeremy Clarkson can be annoyed by an awful lot of things, whether you agree with what he's annoyed with or not, but he seems frustrated that he can't do certain things because of lots of red tape.

And Christopher, you mentioned you've actually spoken to farmers, you've spoken to landowners, you kind of get a real sense of what they're thinking. What are they thinking about? Is the framework just offering another chance for them to have to read a really awfully lot of pages, to then still not really know what to do for the best? Is it too many conflicting pieces of information? What are they saying to you?

Christopher Bishop:

From the interviews that I've done, it's certainly a little bit polarising in that respect. I think a number will see it as, "Oh, here's another strategy, another plan of what the government's going to do, and then in a few years it might change again." But I think there is a growing consensus we need something different from what is being provided now, something that sets out a proper vision, a long-term pathway, and long-term funding commitments so that farmers can plan sort of three, five, seven years ahead because that's ultimately what they're doing to ensure the viability of their farm. And they do have all of this knowledge from the years of experience that they have, but then, with the advent of data and technology that can be used to supplement this, to inform their decision-making so that they can cope with the challenges of climate change and the flooding, the droughts that are coming our way, as well as then the vast amount of potential opportunities that they could take forward in terms of doing different things with their land.

It's also around this cultural shift as to understanding that things that may have been done in the past, for decades or for generations within farming, might not potentially be viable in the future because of all these new threats that we have. But there needs to be a lot more certainty with what this is doing, and it needs to be delivered at pace to actually have the buy-in from farmers to undertake and deliver what the government's trying to set out.

Isabela Butnar:

And could I add to that, until the next iteration of this framework, I think is really important that the government actually sits with farmers to understand what is their needs to implement this long-term vision. The vision is kind of there, but what does it take to the farmer to implement it? What kind of support do they need?

Can the government, or the universities, or some other institution, can they assume some of the burden of delivering all of these multifunctional roles? All this big data and monitoring, reporting and verification, should be given to the farmer to do all of that, or can we do it with drones, satellite data, or any other information?

There are so many smart ways of collecting data. Does it need to be the farmer doing all of that?

Christopher Bishop:

Certainly, the past experiences of farmers and looking back at what policy has and hasn't worked is something that comes up again and again, that farmers will reiterate that, well, we've tried various situations of this in the past, so why isn't this being fed into policy that's now being designed?

And that can potentially be because the civil service changes so rapidly, people move jobs and other things, and that can potentially be another barrier towards delivering this, particularly at pace.

Abbie Chapman:

I was just going to say, I wonder if there's something in the government providing funding for simpler things too, like farmers visiting other farmers. If it's not commercially sensitive, go and learn from a friend further down the country, with some support from the government to make that travel and visit possible, so they can learn from each other's experiences. Someone that's been flooded before can teach someone else about how they responded to it and what they wish they'd had in place with hindsight.

So that sharing of knowledge sometimes could be quite a simple thing if it's funded and supported and encouraged.

Christopher Bishop:

Is there any other ongoing sort of UCL Bartlett work that's worth mentioning within this sort of space?

Isabela Butnar:

Yes, I was going to come in with... So, we have one of the national-scale models which informs the transition to net zero. The government has been using it many times to set the carbon budgets. So, we are continuously improving that model, both on the decarbonisation side and including land use changes, how it could look like, and also on the removal side where we are... learning more and more from greenhouse gas removal demonstration in the UK.

There are other options which do not rely on land. Removals like biochar, which also can sequester carbon for the long term, but also improve soil quality and soil structure, or enhanced rock weathering, which could help as well with increasing yields. And those kind of removal options, they do not require extra land.

Another thing we are trying to do, and I have a PhD student, or actually a couple of PhD students, looking into it now, is to look at food production through the lenses of meeting nutritional needs of people. So, we are starting not talking about food security, but about nutrition security. Can we meet the nutrition needs with fruits and vegetables cultivated in the UK as opposed to relying on imported food? And I think this is really going to help with all of this long-term strategy of what to be developed where.

Abbie Chapman:

That will also help with international commitments as well, Isabela. I was going to mention... So, we were looking at the UK's, I guess, consumption pressure associated with the UK's consumption of fruits and vegetables, and the UK has a huge biodiversity pressure associated with the fruit and vegetables that it is importing from elsewhere.

It's the fruits and vegetables we're growing in nice biodiverse areas overseas, which might make us look quite good on paper with respect to our biodiversity impact, but that's purely because we don't have so much biodiversity left in the UK because we've got a long history of land use impacts on that.

So it's nice to see that you're concentrating on what could we produce in the UK, how does that sort of benefit people, but it might also, we can do it in a way that benefits nature, would be something to consider down the line as well, maybe.

I noticed that the report even kind of links this in a bit further and refers to the newer report that's come out, but perhaps not been covered so well in the media, about food security being a national security issue.

That was a big report that came out. It didn't get much coverage because I think it's quite a scary one. It's the idea that the UK, basically, for its national security, needs to improve its food security, and its food security comes in the form of making sure that food's accessible, yes, but it also needs to be affordable, it needs to be nutritional, it needs to be available all year round.

So there's a lot of things to think about here in a land use plan that is not saying to people how to use agricultural land, for various reasons as we've discussed, but does need to consider how we can build the land in the UK to be resilient for the future.

And I think, as well, on that, it's often biodiversity and food, I've done it myself today, are often talked about as kind of two different things. Two different ways of using the land would be to conserve for nature or to grow food, and actually what needs to be talked about more is how these things are linked.

So if you have more biodiversity, you tend to have more productive food systems, and maybe that's something that the framework could look at a little bit more.

Christopher Bishop:

I certainly agree, Abbie, and it was useful to see that, as a next step, the framework that was published was to look at the impacts of climate change from a two-degree and a four-degree scenario. So hopefully they will start to bring in some of these aspects, particularly in terms of that multifunctionality and bringing concepts together.

So, I think it's been very useful that, after quite a number of years of calling for a land use framework and bringing a kind of systematic approach together, the government has actually gone ahead and produced something on this.

I think the question now becomes whether the land use unit that is being stepped up in DEFRA can quickly learn and quickly deliver a lot of the actions that they say that they are going to deliver, particularly in linking to the 10-year infrastructure strategy that the government has also committed to, and wider spatial development strategies and local nature recovery strategies as well.

And I think it's important that the upcoming farming roadmap, which is going to be published later this year, is also informed by the work that this is doing.

So what do you think needs kind of changing, or needs some next steps?

Isabela Butnar:

I think it's pretty much on the implementation side now. We have all these very good principles, which it's easy to agree with because they seem to be caring for the land and working as custodians of land. So that is really positive.

But how do you put it in practise? Who makes the decisions, and when? How do you reward or punish if the principles are not met? Can we establish some priorities of land uses to make sure biodiversity is within the decision-making, not as an add-on afterwards, after I calculated how much profit I get from this, how many people I fit into the homes, or how much food I produce?

So all of these are quite big questions, and there's lots of work to do, but there is appetite for it as well.

Christopher Bishop:

Abbie, anything that you want to add?

Abbie Chapman:

Yeah, from discussing with you both, what's become clear to me is it'd be good if they didn't reinvent the wheel. So, learn from those around them, not just in academia. So we will have models, scenarios, ideas, maps, things that can be updated if they can make more data more transparent.

They also comment on needing to improve their infrastructure to enable data storage and spatial analysis, and yet a lot of universities, like University College London, have got plenty of data storage, plenty of computing power, and can run these analyses. So actually commissioning universities to do the work might speed things up a little bit.

But also speaking, so it's not all about saying things to farmers. Farmers are out there observing things all the time.

They've got a database of biodiversity knowledge greater than one I could ever find online, just stored in their head from when they're out in the fields. Learn from people, learn from their experiences, learn from what grows where they're living because they've actually watched it change over recent times.

Ask the gardeners what isn't growing anymore, which trees do well, which ones need loads of water that we might not have in the future.

I think if people can listen to each other and learn, then hopefully we can expedite this a little bit as we move into the future.

Christopher Bishop:

The only aspect that I thought was missing, and is key to a lot of this, particularly given the pace that's required to deliver a lot of this, is having a sort of formal reporting requirement, or a kind of monitoring, reporting and verification, as we would often talk about it, in terms of: are they getting on and delivering the actions that they are? And how are they monitoring the changes within land use, what is permanent, what isn't permanent, et cetera?

I think that these are some of the things that, again, we highlighted in our response. So it'd be useful to see the government follow up with actions on what they've done, what they're doing next, and to make that a bit more formal.

Isabela Butnar:

And I suppose the government providing that space where people can learn together in a coherent way, that would be really good.

Christopher Bishop:

So, among academics and within the media, there's quite an active discussion amongst rewilding and farming. What do we think the relevance of that discussion has within the context of the land use framework?

Abbie Chapman:

I think it hits on so many different debates, Chris. So, it's difficult because it's debated even within ecology. So, at the British Ecological Society meetings, there's always discussions about rewilding as a debate. So it's not like biodiversity scientists are all pro it, for instance, which you might assume they would be. So that fits in really well with the land sparing and land sharing debate in the literature, but also in practical terms too.

So, farmers, for instance, could put in a wildflower strip in amongst their farmland, and that would be a form of land sharing, whereas land sparing might have a protected area, or a protected area of woodland, outside away from the farmland. And I guess rewilding kind of suggests you're going to let nature back in as part of your farming process. So, that land-sharing idea.

And actually, where academia are coming to these days is you actually need a hybrid approach. Sometimes you need to spare space for nature for it to thrive and survive because only certain species will do really well as rewilders, and on specific types of landscape as well. So the Knepp Estate in Sussex is a really good example of rewilding, but it is a really specific type of habitat, climate and part of the UK.

And I'm saying the UK here. This framework is for England, but actually there is spillover to the different countries that form part of this island, and we also have to think about freshwater and marine systems as well.

So, rewilding doesn't really consider them, and actually the impacts of land use impact our marine and coastal systems as well as freshwater systems as well. So I guess this kind of relates to nature being connected, and perhaps there isn't just this easy sort of trendy solution that perhaps rewilding is being sold as. That's just my opinion. But yeah, potentially I think that's where we're at with that.

Isabela Butnar:

And can I add to that, Abbie? Actually, I think why this topic is so polarising, scientists and politicians and people more generally, is because it looks like it's one or the other: it's rewilding or farming.

So there is a conflict. It sounds as a conflict, and there are ways to not see it as a conflict.

So, for example, with the greenhouse gas removal demonstration, we learned that soil, it's a massive store of carbon, and it's actually, with the current farming practises, we depleted of all nutrients, of all biodiversity.

We could just change how we farm, keeping soil in mind and nurturing it. So it doesn't need to be one or the other. We can start with things which we can do now, which brings in that rewilding, but is not black or white.

It is, we start with what sustains and makes the food production more resilient.

Christopher Bishop:

I was going to say, I think what's interesting on that is that that then fits into almost that land category, which isn't really in scope for the land use framework, that first category on how we actually manage the land, and the scale of land use change that might be needed.

So that could be a potentially big area that could be utilised if it was potentially in scope of changes moving forwards.

Abbie Chapman:

I think what they do include, which is really nice, is bringing it back down to local scale. So they'll talk about things like habitat creation and things that you can do actually in your own garden.

So gardens capture huge amounts of the land in this country, both public gardens and also private ones. So there's things that you can do at home.

You can make space for nature at home. It doesn't need to be somewhere at the end of your garden. It can become ornamental. It can become part of it, and that messaging's changing.

So maybe if you scale that up and you take that to farming landscapes, you take that to golf courses, if you take that to all the other types of land that are mentioned in the framework, then actually there are, as you say, sort of things we can be doing, and it doesn't need to be a this or that. It can be a bit of both.

Christopher Bishop:

So, bringing it back to that Norfolk farmer example that we spoke about at the start, has the framework given them clarity on what they could do?

And I would say it partially has, particularly in terms of the long-term direction of travel, some tools and data that is going to be coming to support farmers to help understand productive uses of land. But it hasn't answered some of the hardest questions, particularly around how incentives might change to direct this kind of future land use in not being potentially about finance but cultural shifts as well, and how they're going to balance different trade-offs between the different targets that the government wants to meet.

So there's still quite a lot of work that needs to be done, and so it'll be interesting to see how this develops over the next five years and the next iteration of the Land Use Framework.

So my thanks to Isabela and Abbie for their time and expertise. Thank you for joining me today.

Isabela Butnar:

Thank you very much, Chris.

Abbie Chapman:

Thank you, Chris. Thanks, Isabela.

Christopher Bishop:

It's been great to have a chance to talk about this subject, which I know you both care about so passionately, and I hope our listeners have found it interesting and informative too.

If you want to find out more about the work being done here at the Bartlett, links to articles and previous episodes of the Bartlett Review podcast, and a lot more information about the Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment, is available via our website, ucl.ac.uk/bartlett, or you can find us on LinkedIn at the Bartlett UCL.

From me, Chris Bishop, thank you for listening, and goodbye.