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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what assessment she has made of the effectiveness of Environmental Land Management schemes in supporting nature-friendly farming and species recovery.

Environmental Land Management schemes have seen high levels of uptake by the farming sector with 50,000 farm businesses and over half of all agricultural land involved in schemes. Detailed uptake of each action in schemes is published here Agri-environment scheme uptake data - GOV.UK.

We have a large-scale monitoring programme that is assessing the impact of schemes on a range of indicators and environmental outcomes at the appropriate timescales for these types of biological responses. This report summarises some of the latest monitoring and evaluation of government agri-environment schemes: Agri-Environment Evidence Annual Report 2024-2025: A summary of recently published project reports - NERR165.