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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what assessment has she made of the potential merits of offering multi-year funding settlements for nature restoration and protection projects.

The Department has run and is currently running multiple grant schemes funding nature restoration and protection projects. These include a variety of allocation methods including criteria-based and competed general grants to meet the Government’s objectives. The use of multi-year awards is advisable to provide certainty for multi-year projects but dependent on the nature of the project funded