Stewardship – Transfers and Amendments January 17, 2014 12:00 am Environmental Stewardship (ES) is now all but closed to new entrants. However, ELS and HLS agreements still have a number of years to run in many cases. With ongoing farm restructuring, there will still be a need to transfer and amend some of these agreements until they expire. Natural England has just published new guidance on how this is to operate, see – http://www.naturalengland.org.uk/Images/es-info-note-jan-2014_tcm6-36920.pdf. In general terms, transfers will become more restrictive. The principles for 2014 (and presumably thereafter) are that no new land can be entered into an ES agreement, and the terms of an ES agreement cannot be extended. This meansthat if a new occupier of land agrees to take on all or part of an existing agremeent then NE will transfer the requirements unchanged (i.e. option choices and agreement end dates). If the new occupier already has an existing contract, they will end up with two agreements – they will not be merged. Under ELS, if the options on the transfered land are not enough to meet the threshold, then it will be possible to add options to reach the 30 points per hectare target. It has always been possible to request ‘discretionary’ changes to an Stewardship agreement. From 2014 onwards it is unlikely that NE will accept anything but the most critical discretionary amendments.
