Sustainable Farming Incentive

Baroness Hoey Excerpts

Tuesday 18th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

On the detail of the new scheme, as I mentioned earlier, we will consult with stakeholders on how it needs to be reformed to work better for farmers and the environment. We do not want a repeat of problems for farmers, so we need to get it right. We must also look at budgets through the spending review. I cannot give specifics of when it will start up again, but we will start it up again. The current system will last for three years, so we need to look at how to get the next system in place as soon as practically possible, having taken those steps.

On the six weeks’ notice, the SFI scheme was set up as a demand-led scheme. Our aim was to allow as many farmers to join as possible before it was paused. We were not able to give any advance notice of the need to close, because we were concerned that, if we said that we would be closing it, we would suddenly have a lot of extra demand without the funding to manage that demand. I know that this is not what noble Lords want to hear, but that was the reasoning behind it. We must be able to afford to give the funding to support the applications that come in, and budget constraints are very difficult at the moment.

While we aim to give notice and are clearly aware that the website mentioned six weeks, there is no requirement in the scheme to do that. I appreciate that it did say six weeks. As part of reforming it, we want there to be much more sophisticated, effective budget controls around this. As the noble Lord mentioned, farmers need certainty. To give them certainty, we need to ensure that we can assess the scheme in such a way that we can provide that.

[Baroness Hoey (Non-Afl)]

My Lords—

[Baroness Coffey (Con)]

My Lords—

[Lord in Waiting/Government Whip (Lord Leong) (Lab)]

We will hear from the noble Baroness, Lady Hoey, and then from the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey.

[Baroness Hoey (Non-Afl)]

I thank the noble Lord for that.

No matter what is said in justification, this will still be seen as an attack on farming, particularly on small farms. Does the Minister agree that the most important job for farmers is to produce good-quality food, and that all funding going into farming should have that as the priority? Why are we allowing so many solar farms to be put on good agricultural land, with other land being used for things other than farming? Surely that must be a priority if we genuinely care about food security?

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

The noble Baroness’s question references a lot of the longer-term work that Defra is doing to get these things right. Regarding solar farms, the land-use framework is designed to look at things such as where we put energy, where the best-quality agricultural land is, where we put housing and so on. The land-use framework looks to address much of that.

Regarding what farmers should be doing, whether their first priority is to produce food and so on, we are developing the food strategy and the 25-year road map for farming. Both are looking at how we address this and how we ensure that we have high-quality, sustainable food production in this country for us to become as self-sufficient as is practically possible. These are important long-term pieces of work that the department is doing. We wanted to move away from short-term decision-making that did not deliver in the long run. A big criticism of what has happened with the sustainable farming initiative is that it was too short-term. Taking that bigger picture view, to give farmers certainty for the future, is a really important piece of work that the department is doing.