Defra Land Use Consultation Workshops

On 18 March 2025, Farm491 hosted the Royal Agricultural University’s Defra Land Use Consultation workshops with LUNZ Hub at the Alliston Centre.

The Government has launched a national conversation about land use, to inform its forthcoming Land Use Framework. This will create a toolkit for decisions that minimise trade-offs and optimise the use of land in England. 

The RAU and LUNZ Hub are supporting Defra in this process, and ran two consultation workshops, one online in the morning and another in person in the afternoon, for UK-based businesses developing digital innovations related to land use, to ensure their needs and priorities are understood. 

Within these workshops, Defra outlined the scope of the consultation, and the key questions Government needs to answer through it. Attendees then heard an initial response from The Land App on behalf of Making Land Digital, which has identified geospatial data infrastructure priorities.

Following this, the workshops were then opened to the floor, to discuss those initial contributions, hear attendees’ hopes and concerns relating to the framework, and the key factors they thought the Government should address in designing and delivering it.   

The Government consultation will remain open until 25 April, with more information available on the Defra website. 

Attendees of the in-person workshop hosted by Farm491 at the Alliston Centre