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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what assessment he has made of whether the delivery timeline of environmental land management schemes will ensure timely access to new payments for farmers moving on from old payments.

The first Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) pilot agreements will start this year. Then, next year we will start to rollout core elements of the SFI, expanding those elements until we have the full offer available in 2024/2025. Importantly, we are running Countryside Stewardship and the SFI in parallel, and both are open to new and existing scheme agreement holders, though we will not fund the same action twice.

The final round of Countryside Stewardship will open in 2023, with agreements starting on 1 January 2024. We plan to start a phased rollout of the Local Nature Recovery scheme from 2023. We will be launching at least ten Landscape Recovery projects between 2022 and 2024. This makes us confident that the full environmental land management offer will be on tap before the end of the transition period.