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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, for what reason his Department did not give six weeks’ notice when closing Sustainable Farming Incentive applications.

To ensure fair access, and to avoid the risk of overspend, we could not give any advance notice to avoid creating a sudden increase in the level of demand.

Whilst we aim to give notice where possible (and we are aware the application service mentioned this intention of 6 weeks’ notice), there was no requirement in the scheme rules for SFI24 for us to give any notice before we closed applications.