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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps he is taking to help ensure that people farming on commons can benefit from (a) the Sustainable Farming Incentive and (b) Countryside Stewardship.

We want people farming on commons land to benefit from both the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) and Countryside Stewardship and are working to make applications to the SFI service available to commoners and other shared graziers. We have asked farmers on commons interested in applying to SFI to contact the Rural Payments Agency so that we can help farmers to prepare to apply and be ready when the application service is available. We will set out more details of the Countryside Stewardship Higher Tier offer in due course. To help with a group’s costs of administering a common land SFI agreement, an annual additional payment of £7 per hectare of eligible common land is available.