Agriculture: Subsidies

(asked on 10th June 2019) - View Source

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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, if he will publish the risk register for the environmental land management scheme programme.


Answered by
Robert Goodwill Portrait
Robert Goodwill
This question was answered on 17th June 2019

These questions have been answered as one to enable the Environmental Land Management Scheme (ELM) approach to be outlined in full in a single place.

An ELM is being developed to pay land managers public money for delivering environmental public goods. This is a large programme of work with 81 full time staff with grades ranging from Administrative Officer to Deputy Director.

The Government has taken a number of steps to ensure it has strong risk and programme management foundations in place and will continue to assess and manage these as appropriate. It is not Government policy to publish departmental risk registers given the inherent risks involved.

ELM is scheduled to be rolled out from late 2024, with a National Pilot beginning in late 2021. Detailed planning of the pilot is in train. The pilot will run for three years, and will aim to assess the end-to-end operability and deliverability of the scheme and allow us to identify and refine any issues or barriers that occur in practice.

To support the development of ELM we are undertaking a number of test and trials. The work is being facilitated by a range of stakeholders, including farmer groups, representative bodies and non-governmental organisations, and covers a range of geographies and sectors. 47 proposals are being taken forward in phase 1. We are working closely with stakeholders to finalise these. Depending on the complexity of the test or trial we anticipate the first of these commencing in Autumn 2019. We have received over 200 proposals for phase 2. We will prioritise those proposals that fill gaps in scheme delivery components, outcomes and land management sectors identified from the coverage of the first 47 proposals.

We are working with stakeholders to understand how much funding they might require from the Government to support the delivery of the tests and trials in line with value for money principles.

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