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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, for what reasons his Department decided to (a) announce the closure of and (b) close the Sustainable Farming Incentive scheme to new applicants on the same day.

This Government has committed £5 billion over 2 years to sustainable farming and nature recovery and we’ve worked hard to get as many farmers into environmental land management schemes as possible.

The Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) now has more than 37,000 multi-year live agreements and is not only delivering sustainable food production and nature’s recovery for today and the years ahead, but it is also putting money back into farmers’ pockets.

With record numbers of farm businesses in farming schemes and the sustainable farming budget successfully allocated, we have stopped accepting new applications for SFI.

This high uptake of the scheme means it is fully subscribed. The decision to close the scheme to new applications was taken at that point.  We could not give any advance notice because we needed to ensure fair access to the scheme and avoid creating a sudden increase in the level of demand.