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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what assessment his Department has made of the potential impact of the closure of the Sustainable Farming Incentive on the effectiveness of the Environmental Land Management scheme.

Defra has closed the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) for the submission of new applications, but existing agreements will continue. We now have over 37,000 live SFI agreements. Every penny in all existing SFI agreements will be paid to farmers, and outstanding eligible applications that have been submitted will be processed.

We will provide further details about the reformed SFI offer once the Spending Review has been completed.