Council-owned UK farmland falls by more than half in four decades

The report puts the farmland reduction down to austerity, a lack of want by some councils to innovate to develop new income streams or business models, and ‘a sense that county farms are a thing of the past’.

It said councils that had taken a different approach had yielded positive results, such as the 100ha Cambridgeshire County Council-owned Whitehall Farm, which is working with an agroforestry and arable crops approach to build the profitability, resilience and sustainability of the farm.

Cambridgeshire was just one of two councils to increase its area between 2010-18, by 1,389ha. Tenant Farmers Association chief executive George Dunn said without council farms there was ‘basically no route into agriculture for people who want to farm on their own account’.

One of the report’s central recommendations is to require local authorities to submit management plans for scrutiny to Defra.

Mr Dunn said: “Often, we see bad financial management within local authorities lead to poor decisions being made to dispose of county farms without proper justification. This has got to stop.”