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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, pursuant to the Answer of 4 February 2025 to Question 26765 on Soil: Conservation, what steps he is taking to ensure that family farms below the threshold required to access (a) Countryside Stewardship Higher Tier and (b) Sustainable Farming Incentive schemes are able to receive support to prevent soil degradation on agricultural land impacted by repeated flooding.

The Government continues to roll out ELM schemes, including Countryside Stewardship Higher Tier (CSHT) and the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI), to support farmers in actions including improving soil health and supporting flood and drought resilience. CSHT is in its pre-application phase with applications opening in summer, and the SFI is open for applications.

There is no size or income threshold below which a farm would not be eligible to apply for either scheme. For SFI, the requirement that farmers must have been eligible for the Basic Payment Scheme (BPS) in either 2022 or 2023 no longer applies to the expanded SFI offer. This means that groups that were not eligible for BPS are now eligible to apply for the expanded SFI offer. This includes groups such as new entrants, non-farming land managers and smallholders.

For CSHT, farmers, foresters or land managers wishing to apply must have management control of the land they want to enter into CSHT actions for the duration of those actions, and cannot be paid twice for the same activity included in other agreements. We have published information that sets out what you can do now to prepare to apply for CSHT. We will publish more details on the timing and approach to widening applications further in 2025. We will also provide more details in February about how other farm and land managers who are not initially invited, but who are interested in applying for CSHT, can contact RPA.