An inclusive, multifunctional approach is needed to balance competing demands on the UK’s limited land. © iStock

Land is a finite resource under increasing pressure. By one recent estimate, the UK would need an area more than double the size of Wales to meet all the government’s targets for climate and nature restoration by 2050. If the UK is also going to build millions of new homes, produce clean energy and grow nutritious food, many actors will have to make smart decisions about land to deliver multiple outcomes at once. The problem is that the current set of decision-making tools is not up to the job of managing the complexity and multifunctionality needed.

This is where the land use framework comes in. Put simply, this is a process that helps mediate and resolve difficult choices about how to use land. The Food, Farming and Countryside Commission (FFCC) developed the concept as part of its initial inquiry, which culminated in 2019. Back then, we were warned that land was a somewhat taboo topic. But with so many critical issues coalescing around land use decisions, we found widespread acknowledgement that it was time to face into the tensions. To aid our deliberations, we looked around the UK and internationally for ideas about what works.

Inspiration came from the Public Value Framework designed by Sir Michael Barber for the Treasury, a process designed to facilitate better decisions around public spending. Building on this approach proved to be the breakthrough needed. Working with expert colleagues with diverse interests in land, we explored a framework approach, based on a set of principles and practices applicable at any scale, for local and national organisations, businesses and communities. We investigated the data and expertise needed by leaders and land use decision makers to help them balance competing imperatives. Our collaborative research crystallised into six guiding principles, underpinned with supporting ways of working.

The six guiding principles and ways of working for an effective land use framework:

Land-led: Land should be being used for the things that it suits: going with the grain, learning from experience and history, appropriate to the geology, habitats, soil and landscape character.

Adaptive and resilient: Land should be being used in a way that adapts to and mitigates change created by the climate crisis (including the uncertainties and risks brought by increased flooding and drought, shifting seasons and temperatures and new pests and diseases), to enable communities to respond to multiple future scenarios.

Locally responsive: The people who own, manage or farm land and lead decision-making should integrate local needs and aspirations into plans and be mindful of responsibilities to their local environment and community. The decision-making process must bring together views from across local urban and rural communities and include varied expertise to build shared understanding.

Outward and future focused: Local decision-making needs to account for impacts on other communities, the non-human world and the needs and wellbeing of future generations.

Multifunctional: With its area limited, land needs to be used to its full capabilities to bring about multiple benefits that address varied human and ecological needs for food, water, clean air, energy, nature, health and wellbeing. Organisations and agencies should work together to consider potential multifunctional uses and values to ensure potential unintended consequences are understood.

Contributing prosperity: Land can be used to sustain local livelihoods, jobs and supply chains, without waste and while also delivering additional public benefits.

However, ‘a map is not the territory’ and models and frameworks are inconsequential unless they help in material and genuine ways.

Following publication of those early ideas, the FFCC has had the opportunity to test and develop the framework. This has taken place through trials in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, and Devon, with oversight from our national advisory group. The trials have been carried out through partnerships with local bodies and national agencies, such as the Geospatial Commission, the Environment Agency, British Geographical Survey and World Wildlife Fund, among others.

Beginning in 2020–21, these pilots trialled how these frameworks might work at a local level, while the government was deciding what position to take. While there are many ways of defining what is ‘local’ – catchment, landscape or bioregional – we opted to trial a political scale, both to anchor the framework alongside other initiatives and to offer local citizens a degree of democratic accountability over the process.

The pilots provided many lessons about how frameworks can work in practice. Committed leadership was central to success: bringing together relevant stakeholders and evidence, discussing the trade-offs and tensions inherent to land use issues and attending regular meetings to build trust and knowledge in the process required significant investment from the leadership across the local system. These pilots took a county-level approach, but land use decisions must be taken at a scale appropriate to the topic. This is why it is so important that the framework has national guidelines, while the data and approaches are interoperable across boundaries and scales.

Starting with principles informs the kinds of questions that a land use framework should ask. This approach also determines the data and evidence that decision-makers should draw upon to make informed choices. For example, decisions aiming to build resilience should focus on both present and future risks of problems such as flooding and drought, that will only be exacerbated by climate change. This might mean examining future scenarios and climate predictions. Similarly, the principle of focusing outward requires the consideration of the impact of potential land use choices or changes beyond the immediate area, whether that is further down the river catchment or around national food supply chains. What we’ve also found is that these principles can be applied across different parts of the country and at different scales, including in the devolved administrations of Wales and Scotland, where there has been a more joined-up approach to land-use decision-making than England.

Over the last five years, the notion of a land use framework has taken hold. It has appeared in the National Food Strategy, a Royal Society Report and a House of Lords Committee on Land Use, among many others. Meanwhile, the government in England has spent many years developing its own version of the framework. After several false starts, a 12-week consultation was launched in January 2025. This has been a precious opportunity for everyone with a stake in how we collectively make decisions about the UK’s limited land to make this process the best it can possibly be.

Alongside Defra’s engagement programme, FFCC ran a supporting series of workshops across the country.

It’s exciting that at long last England is having a meaningful, national conversation about land use. But there’s a risk that what emerges from this discussion falls short of the ambition that’s required to meet all our urgent challenges.

After Secretary of State Steve Reed launched this conversation with a speech at the Royal Geographical Society, media attention focused on the maps and projections for land use change. While maps are a key element of a land use framework, they should be tools for smart decision-making rather than the end result. They help organise our thinking for a particular purpose but the aim should be to create a process that helps people make choices that work for the collective benefit.

Focusing on maps can lead to another mistake. A land use framework should not be dictated from Westminster as a top-down strategy, though you’ll often hear policymakers and politicians slip into that language. The nature of a framework is important. What’s needed is a process or an architecture for decision-making that identifies the important questions and establishes some principles for answering them. Importantly, these principles and the data informing the choices made should be formed from the bottom up, while also reflecting regional and national priorities. Farmers and people in communities will often have deep knowledge about the landscapes that surround them, including how they can achieve multiple outcomes at once. A successful framework will live and die by this on-the-ground support.

Defra’s consultation focuses mainly on the use of land for food production and nature. At FFCC we’ve learned through our trials that people involved in making balanced, long-term decisions require much more information. Where are the future housing needs? What water stresses is this area going to face? What energy and transport infrastructure is going to be required? What access to greenspace does the public need for healthy lives? They want answers, not for some abstract reason, but because resolving these questions has a material impact on their everyday lives, where they live and work. While academics and policymakers are brilliant at their own specialisms, working out how to use land requires us to break out of siloed thinking into a more systemic and grounded approach. The framework should bring all this information into one place. There are several other spatial plans in development or in existence, at both local and national scales, such as the new Spatial Development Strategies and the Strategic Spatial Energy Plan. The land use framework should draw on these and provide a process through which they can all work together, especially in rural areas. One way to resolve these challenges is to see Defra’s framework as a starting point, rather than a finished product. A land use framework can be an incredibly powerful tool, but it’s also new and will need to develop further as people employ its principles to make decisions and draw on its common store of evidence. It will also need updating over time, as the world we inhabit changes, and our national priorities change accordingly. What won’t change is that land will remain a precious and vital resource and we need a way of working together to optimise decisions made about it.

Landscape Institute consultation response: Land use

In spring 2025, the government consulted on its vision for land use in England, with feedback helping to inform the development of a Land Use Framework.

The Landscape Institute advocates a holistic, integrated, multifunctional and well-informed approach to land management across all landscapes. We support a Land Use Framework that emphasises nature recovery, sustainable food production, and soil health, but have reservations about the proposed scale and nature of land use changes, which particularly focuses change on only 19% of agricultural land.

We disagree with a segregated approach as 1) all land is inherently multifunctional; 2) natural assets are interconnected; 3) broader societal benefits require a holistic consideration of all land. We advocate a multifunctional and mutualistic approach across the entire landscape, integrating nature recovery into all land management (including urban growth).

We support the Framework’s development, but it should incentivise land managers to adopt practices with multiple benefits, fostering synergies between environmental, social, and economic objectives, rather than a rigid, top-down approach. We also advocate a more integrated and multifunctional approach across the whole landscape, given our concerns about the proposed scale and categorisation of rural land.

Our key recommendations include:

– Universally apply land-use principles; all land should be included, ensuring that no area is excluded from potential benefits.

– Deliver strategic, landscape-scale policies; we believe this is the most practical scale, reflecting underlying natural characteristics, rather than political boundaries. County, protected landscape, district and unitary authorities should collaborate at a sub-regional scale to deliver sustainable outcomes.

– Provide regulatory intervention to balance economic viability with environmental quality; the Framework should incentivise land managers to adopt practices with multiple benefits, fostering synergies between environmental, social, and economic objectives.

– Address resource and skills shortages; these include the landscape profession (landscape scientists, managers and architects), as well as planning, environment and forestry.