What the countryside is thinking - results of The Knight Frank Rural Sentiment Survey 2024

It seems as if the UK’s landowners and farmers are falling out of love with politicians. According to the results of our annual Rural Sentiment Survey, 51% were dissatisfied with the support provided by the previous government. Only 3% claimed to be “very satisfied”.

But the outlook is no less harsh for Keir Starmer’s new administration. Of our respondents, 45% are “not at all confident” that Labour will do a better job than the Conservatives. Just 14% said they were very confident.

This level of political dissatisfaction, no doubt combined with this year’s less-than-ideal weather, helps to explain why many rural businesses are feeling a bit gloomy.

Optimism is down

When we asked how optimistic they were for the outlook of their businesses compared with 12 months ago, 42% said “slightly” or “a lot” less. This compares with 26% who said they were feeling “slightly” or “a lot” more optimistic.

Looking ahead, not all rural businesses are feeling positive compared to 12 months ago.

The specific issues landowners say are affecting their ability to run their businesses also provide some clues as to the reasons for the drop in optimism. This year the top three chosen by those taking the survey were: Planning issues (61%), government rural policy (53%) and input & energy costs (50%).

Planning always scores highly so it will be interesting to see what impact, if any, the government’s reform of the National Planning Policy Framework will have on next year’s survey.

Land use

The debate about how the countryside should be used continues to rage. When we asked our respondents what services they thought it was most important for farms and estates to deliver, the answer was pretty emphatic.

Over 80% said producing food was “very important”, with 53% going as far as to say individual businesses should feel a sense of responsibility for the UK’s food security. Just over 40% said boosting biodiversity was “very important”, with only 30% feeling the same way about generating renewable energy.

Not such good news for energy minister Ed Miliband who wants to ramp up the UK’s onshore solar and wind capacity.

Land prices surged under the previous Labour government; it will be interesting to see what happens this time around.

The environment

Although boosting biodiversity wasn’t the top priority for most survey respondents, 87% of them did say they had started to manage their farms or estates in a more environmentally friendly way.

When asked why, the most popular reasons given were altruistic. Almost 64% of respondents want to see more biodiversity on their land, 59% claim they enjoy nature conservation, while 57% believe it is important that everybody makes an effort to tackle climate change.

Increasing biodiversity and climate change mitigation does rate highly amongst peoples' priorities for their businesses.

However, a significant number (43%) say they are doing it to save money on input costs, while 42% need the money from environmental schemes to make up for the loss of Basic Payment Scheme cash.

In terms of what actions they have taken to become more environmentally friendly, planting trees (70%) was by far the most popular. Making residential properties more energy efficient (58%) came next. Interestingly, an encouragingly high proportion (38%) have already started to embrace elements of regenerative farming.

Half of the respondents said they had applied for some kind of grant funding to support their environmental activities.

To request a copy of the full survey results, please get in touch with our team.

The results feature throughout the latest edition of The Rural Report. Click below to download the full report or request a hardcopy of the publication.

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