The Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Dr Thérèse Coffey)
This Government are committed to backing British farmers, who produce some of the highest quality food in the world, contribute billions to our economy and are the custodians of our countryside.
We plan to replace the basic payment scheme in England with delinked payments in 2024, making things much simpler for both farmers and the Rural Payments Agency—building on the simplifications we have already made to existing schemes. Delinking will free up farmers to focus on running their business and delivering the public goods that can be rewarded under the environmental land management schemes.
On 18 September we opened the sustainable farming incentive 2023 (SFI) to applications. As of 12 October, we have received over 14,000 expressions of interest—equivalent to more than one in eight farmers—with the first groups of farmers already implementing their SFI agreements, and many more due to start in the coming days and weeks.
We have also seen farmers continue to show their interest in other environmental land management schemes, such as landscape recovery, where we have received a significant number of high-quality applications that are now being carefully considered. With 7,881 mid-tier and 1,030 higher-tier countryside stewardship applications in this year’s round, we have also seen sustained interest in the countryside stewardship offer, following a two-week extension of the application window in response to a challenging harvest. There are now over 33,000 countryside stewardship agreements in place across England in September 2023—a 94% increase since 2020. We are now spending £688 million on rewarding farmers for environmental, climate and animal welfare outcomes this financial year, as part of the wider £2.4 billion that we are committed to spend supporting farmers every year of this Parliament.
To ensure that farmers are treated fairly, we are developing new legislation to improve supply chain fairness in the dairy and pig sectors, with further reviews into fairness in egg and horticulture supply chains due to launch in October and December respectively. To support long-term decision making, the Government also intend to publish their response to the independent review into labour shortages in the food supply chain later this autumn, as planned.
The Government are also committed to supporting farmers to realise their contribution to the rural economy. Together with the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, we will shortly publish a review of permitted development rights on farms. We are working to grant funding for farmers to invest in the productivity of their businesses and, for the first time, barn-top solar by the end of this year.
We recognise both the pressures facing smaller abattoirs and the opportunities available to them, so we will be launching a smaller abattoir fund by the end of 2023, providing financing for capital investments to support productivity, improved animal welfare and adding value to primary products.
To continue our progress, we will maintain engagement with the agricultural sector and provide practical opportunities for farmers that maintain our food security and also deliver on our environmental ambitions.
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