Our immediate focus in England is to influence and shape three key policy discussions: the Food Strategy, the 25-Year Farming Roadmap, and the Land Use Framework.
Working across all four UK nations, FFCC is uniquely positioned to share learning from diverse regions, strengthening national advocacy through the best local examples.
Following our extensive work talking to citizens about food in The Food Conversation, FFCC is working with The Food Foundation and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) to ensure citizens’ everyday experiences of food are at the heart of policy development for the government's food strategy.
Alongside industry voices, academics and civil society leaders, citizens from The Food Conversation and Food Ambassadors from The Food Foundation will be able to shape the strategy by sharing the hopes, needs and concerns of people across the country.
Since first proposing a Land Use Framework in our 2019 report, Our Future in the Land, the FFCC has led trials in Devon and Cambridgeshire and Peterborough to test how a Land Use Framework could work in practice. Our work culminated in a report,
which found that a Land Use Framework works best as a process, based on a set of principles and practices to align top-down and bottom-up priorities, mediate competing pressures and encourage multifunctionality.
In January 2025, Defra launched a Land Use consultation, incorporating many of FFCC’s principles and recommendations. Recognising FFCC’s leadership in convening senior stakeholders and piloting regional Land Use Frameworks and discussions, the government formally requested FFCC’s support in ensuring place-based input into the Consultation on Land Use for England. As part of this, Defra commissioned FFCC to design and run a series of workshops in the first half of 2025.
Following the publication of our influential Farming for Change report in 2020, our Farming Futures team have focused on bringing together leaders in the sector through our Farming Leadership Symposia – and amplifying farmer’s voices through events, films and podcasts. We are currently the secretariat for the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Farming – and are working with government to ensure the 25 year Farming Roadmap helps drives the transition towards a more sustainable, equitable and resilient future for farming in the UK.
