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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what estimate he has made of the number of hectares of land managed by each applicant to the Landscape Recovery scheme.

Landscape Recovery offers farmers and land managers the opportunity to co-design a bespoke, long-term agreement to produce environmental and climate goods whilst supporting environmentally sustainable domestic food production across landscape-scale projects.

Landscape Recovery Round 1 supports 22 projects. Project areas range between 500 and 5,000 hectares, covering a total of over 40,000 hectares. Round 2 is expected to support 34 projects, covering a total of over 200,000 hectares. Rounds 1 and 2 include over 250 and over 700 land managers, respectively. The majority of projects currently in Round 1 involve at least one tenant, and it is expected that over three quarters of Round 2 projects will include tenants. We want to make Landscape Recovery work in a range of contexts, especially where there is a diversity of land managers. We are closely monitoring how the scheme works for tenants in light of the findings and recommendations of the Rock Review.

We have a legal duty to assess the impact of all our Environmental Land Management schemes, including Landscape Recovery, on food production. All Landscape Recovery projects are required to assess their impact on food production in detail during the project development phase. We also introduced a food production criterion at the application phase in Round 2, through which we assessed how bidders were taking into consideration food production in their plans, mitigating any negative impact where possible and supporting sustainable food production.