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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, whether Landscape Recovery will receive approximately £800 million of the overall Environmental Land Management scheme budget after 2024-2028, as set out in his Department's June 2021 agricultural transition update.

Our plans for the Landscape Recovery pilot have not changed. We have received 51 applications from across England from round one which closed on 24 May.

We will take forward up to 15 pilot projects in this round and we aim to announce the outcome of the selection process later this summer, following assessment of the applications.

We confirmed last week that we will spend up to £50 million from the farming budget on Landscape Recovery projects over the next three years. This intent has not changed. As we transition to our new schemes, we plan to learn as we go and find the best ways to manage the overall farming budget to respond to demand in a way that helps us achieve our intended outcomes. Rather than adopting a fixed and inflexible allocation for funding across our environmental land management schemes, we make sure that we can respond to farmer demand for our schemes while ensuring we remain on track to deliver our policies on food production and protecting nature.

The Government has committed to maintain the farming budget for England at £2.4 billion per year throughout this parliament and this was confirmed again in the recent Spending Review. Future spending allocations beyond the length of this spending review period will be determined at future fiscal events in the usual way.