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 support sustainable farming.

The Sustainable Farming Incentive is one of three new Environmental Land Management schemes that reward farmers and land managers for producing public goods. It will pay farmers for actions they take (going beyond regulatory requirements) to manage their land in an environmentally sustainable way. The aim is to make the Sustainable Farming Incentive attractive and accessible to a wide range of farmers, to help them maintain or introduce sustainable practices as a foundation for more advanced improvements available through other components of Environmental Land Management. We are working with English farmers, in partnership, to design our new systems and support the choices that they make for their own holdings.

This year we will start to roll out core elements of the scheme, before gradually expanding the scheme until all elements are available from 2024/25 onwards. The core elements of the Sustainable Farming Incentive that will be available in 2022 are: arable and horticultural soils standard; improved grassland soils standard; moorland and rough grazing standard; and Annual Health and Welfare Review.

We plan to open the Countryside Stewardship 2023 offer in February 2022 with offers for Higher tier, Mid-tier, Wildlife offers, and Capital grants, for agreements starting on 1 January 2023. The scheme will also be open to new applicants in 2023 (for agreements starting in 2024).   We will help farmers in Countryside Stewardship make the transition to our new schemes from 2024. We have also increased payment rates under Countryside Stewardship, which saw a 40% increase in applications this year.