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 is taking to ensure that farmers on common land can benefit from the (a) Sustainable Farming Incentive and (b) Environmental Land Management schemes.

To support the development of the environmental land management schemes, we are working with a number of stakeholders to help us understand how the building blocks of the future schemes could work in practice on common land. One of our key mechanisms for working with farmers and land managers is through our 78 tests and trials which cover a range of different geographies, sectors and farm types. We have three tests and trials focused on commons and the results of these tests and trials are feeding into the development of the Sustainable Farming Incentive and other environmental land management schemes.