Hedges and Ditches: Conservation

(asked on 7th February 2022) - View Source

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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, how much of Countryside Stewardship funding will be allocated towards planting new hedgerows; and what assessment he has made of the contribution that will make to increasing hedgerows to meet the Climate Change Committee’s target of 40 per cent increase in hedgerows by 2050, with an interim target of 20 per cent by 2035.


Answered by
Rebecca Pow Portrait
Rebecca Pow
Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs)
This question was answered on 16th February 2022

The Countryside Stewardship (CS) scheme provides important funding for the planting and maintenance of hedgerows. In 2021, 3870 agreements included hedge-planting, creating over 2,700km of new hedgerows. In 2021, there were also over 9,000 CS agreements with the management of hedgerows option, covering over 46,000 km of hedgerows. The new round of CS opened for applications on 8 February.

The rollout of standards in the Sustainable Farming Incentive scheme (SFI), and other environmental land management schemes, will support the delivery of our environmental and climate goals, and the delivery of our 2030 species abundance target. The hedgerow standard, part of the new SFI scheme, will continue to recognise and fund the management of hedgerows. We will pay farmers to plant more hedgerows, leave them uncut or raise the cutting height.

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