Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps his Department will take to assess whether the Environmental Land Management scheme is contributing towards the Government’s environmental goals.

Environmental Land Management schemes are being designed to contribute to a suite of measurable objectives to support the delivery of government priorities, including the targets which are due to be set under the Environment Act. We will be carrying out a programme of annual monitoring across a sample of agreements to ensure that actions are delivering both value for money and the intended outcomes. This monitoring will begin during the Sustainable Farming Incentive pilot in 2022.

The methods for gathering our evidence base will combine established data collection techniques, including expert led farm/field surveys, with increased use of technology, including earth observation and remote sensing where appropriate. This will enable us to establish baselines and environmental change across a range of indicators in line with scheme objectives. Indicators will encompass a number of different spatial and temporal scales to capture the changes that occur as a result of the schemes. Some indicators will focus on changes at an action level where others will look at impacts across landscapes. Indicators for the Environmental Land Management Programme are aligned with the 25 Year Environment Plan indicators which monitor overall environmental delivery against the government’s strategic goals for environmental improvement.

We are also working closely with national monitoring programmes such as Natural Capital and Ecosystem Assessment to make use of existing and planned widescale environmental data collection. Data collection outside of agreements will provide valuable counterfactual information to enable us to establish changes that have resulted from scheme activities.

Alongside the national scale monitoring of schemes and environmental delivery, we will be continuing a programme of bespoke research and development projects as part of the Agri-environment Scheme Monitoring and Evaluation Programme. This long running programme assesses specific aspects of environmental delivery and will feed into policy design and improvement. As environmental outcomes can take longer to deliver, we will also be utilising modelling approaches to supplement data collection and provide additional insights.