Environmental Land Management Schemes

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Monday 24th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord. I think he will be reassured that, in moving from area payments to a more nuanced system of supporting environmental activities, farmers will be encouraged to farm their best land as best they can and look at those corners of fields and other parts of their farm that are less productive and are economic only because of the basic payment scheme. I hope he will see that kind of, if you like, market-led push by the Government as moving in the right direction. As far as a register is concerned, that will have to happen as part of further schemes, which will require local authorities, or local government at some level, to be involved in their rollout.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I join in the words of welcome to the Minister. Some 30% of farmland in England is let to tenant farmers. Published survey evidence reveals a lack of confidence and willingness among them to participate in the SFI pilot. Their association spokesperson said that

“tenant farmers are concerned that DEFRA does not fully understand or appreciate the diversity of land management models that exist within British agriculture”

and that

“the pilot may not be able to fully test out the implications of the scheme for the tenanted sector.”

How do the Government plan to ensure that this is not the case?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

We have had about 2,000 requests to enter the sustainable farming initiative pilot; we will probably go with around 1,000 of those, starting from October this year. We intend to have a wide geographical base as well as a wide group of different farm sizes; this will certainly include tenant farms, and we are working with the Tenant Farmers Association to achieve that.