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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, if she will make an estimate of the potential cost of soil degradation to the economy.

The Government is not currently considering conducting any such estimate. An academic paper in 2015 using data from 2010 estimated the quantifiable costs for soil degradation in England and Wales to be between £0.9 bn and £1.4 bn per year (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800915003171).

This Government recognises that healthy soils are the foundation of sustainable farming and underpin a range of environmental benefits, as well as production.

To that end, we are focusing on soil in two of the first standards that have been rolled out under the Sustainable Farming Incentive scheme in 2022 – the Improved Grassland Soils and Arable and Horticultural Soils standards.