Environmental Land Management Schemes

Lord Colgrain Excerpts

Monday 24th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

Like the noble Earl, I certainly recognise the need to provide further certainty. That is why in November we published the agricultural transition plan, which set out in detail how we will phase out direct payments and will support the sector to contribute to environmental goals and to be profitable and economically sustainable without subsidy. Since then, we have launched the initial farm resilience fund, opened the Countryside Stewardship scheme to further applications and published a consultation on delinking and the lump-sum exit scheme. More than 2,000 farmers have applied to pilot the sustainable farming incentive. Across the summer, we will provide further information on early rollout of the sustainable farming incentive, the farming in protected landscapes programme and our tree health pilot, and we will announce the successful applicants for the farming resilience fund.

[Lord Colgrain (Con)]

I welcome the Minister to his new role. Will he confirm that the results of the ELMS trials will be available to all and, in particular, that it will be possible to compare like-for-like soil types and typographies? Will he also confirm the possibility of carbon credits being applied more broadly across existing woodland and coppice, as opposed to the present eligibility for new woodland planting only?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

I am grateful for the kind comments of welcome. I am living proof that you can boil cabbage twice: it is very nice to be back at the department. We are introducing three schemes that reward the delivery of environmental benefits: the sustainable farming incentive, the local nature recovery scheme and the landscape recovery scheme. The noble Lord is entirely right to talk about the importance of soils. They are fundamental to the first two schemes. As far as carbon credits are concerned, this is a huge opportunity for the farming community, particularly in getting some private sector investment to supplement farm incomes. I hope that we can have a clear system that will operate very soon for farmers to access.