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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, with reference to 25 Year Environment Plan published on 11 January 2018, what estimate he has made of the additional financial resources required to deliver the commitments made in that plan for the financial years (a) 2019-20 (b) 2020-21 and (c) 2021-22.

Delivering the plan requires systemic changes across all parts of our economy. Our recently published Green Finance Strategy is an example of how we are driving this change by ensuring environmental risks and opportunities are integrated into mainstream financial decision-making; and accelerating finance to support the delivery of our environmental ambitions.

A key pillar of this approach is our plan to replace the scheme of payments under the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy with a new Environmental Land Management scheme. As we leave the EU, we will establish a new scheme of payments to reward land managers for providing public goods, aligned to the goals of the 25 Year Environment Plan.

In addition, the forthcoming Environment Bill will introduce a mandatory biodiversity net gain requirement for development. This will incentivise the avoidance of environmental impacts in development design, encourage the delivery of wildlife habitats in development sites, and stimulate the development of markets in habitat creation which will help to ensure that developers are able to fulfil net gain obligations off site when appropriate. We have also announced £50 million of funding for a new Woodland Carbon Guarantee to stimulate domestic carbon offsetting and incentivise new tree planting, and awarded £10 million of funding to four landscape-scale projects to help restore 6,580 hectares of upland and lowland peatlands over three years, with forecast 23,000 tonnes of carbon saved per year.