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All week we’re looking at planning and the countryside. The government has announced plans for "brownfield passports", to fast track house building on brownfield sites. The countryside charity, CPRE, has welcomed the proposals to make brownfield sites the first choice for building new homes. It says we could build most of the homes we need on such sites and says this could be in rural areas, as well as urban ones.

Green belt land was originally designed to protect the countryside from urban sprawl but some parts of it have been developed, and they are now considered ‘grey belt’ land. There’s a general acceptance that some of this land will have to be built on - providing space for some of the new 1.5 million homes the government's pledged to build over the next parliament. We look at two council areas - one where thousands of new homes have been built in the countryside, another which is creating 1000s of hectares of new green belt.

2024 is the year when payments to farmers in England, from the old EU Basic Payment Scheme, or BPS, really start to go down. They will be phased out completely by 2027. For instance, a farmer who used to receive £50,000 under the pre-Brexit scheme, will this year receive £26,000. Instead farmers can now sign up to a new agri-environment scheme: the Sustainable Farming Incentive, or SFI. It has more than a hundred actions for which farmers are paid. They’re designed to improve nature habitats, lessen flooding, improve soil health and provide cleaner water courses, and more. We visit a field event which helps farmers navigate their way through the new schemes.

Presenter = Anna Hill
Producer = Rebecca Rooney