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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what plans she has to create public access available to all through Environmental Land Management.

Protecting our environment is at the heart of the Government manifesto and we will always back British farmers and our rural communities. Environmental land manage-ment is the foundation of our new approach.

We want to support access to our countryside, farmland or woodland so the public can understand and become engaged with farming and the environment. It can also provide recreation opportunities and health benefits. Under Countryside Stewardship we already pay for a number of actions focusing on increasing public access:

• farmers hosting tours of their farms for school pupils and care farming visi-tors (ED1)
• providing access maps and signage, and preparing sites for access by providing toilet facilities, shelters, new footpaths, bridges and gates, with the objective of greater public accessibility of the countryside (AC1)
• accreditation for staff carrying out countryside educational access visits (AC2)
• a supplement to enable permissive access across woodland, where access is currently limited (WS4)

Through our Farming in Protected Landscapes programme we also pay for projects that provide opportunities for people to discover, enjoy and understand the landscape and its cultural heritage, including permissive access.

As we continue to expand and improve our schemes, building on the successful adoption of Countryside Stewardship, we are exploring how we can update and pay for actions covering permissive access; managing existing access pressures on land and water, and; expanding education access beyond groups of school pupils and care farming visitors.

Public access is also supported by our Landscape Recovery scheme. Projects are assessed for the benefits they will deliver for a wide range of objectives including social outcomes, and are required to complete a site access plan as part of the project development phase.