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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, how much funding (a) his Department allocated to and (b) was spent by the (i) Natural Environment Investment Readiness Fund, (ii) Nature Recovery Network, (iii) Countryside Stewardship scheme, (iv) CS Capital Grants, (v) Nature for Climate Fund and (vi) Landscape Recovery scheme in each year since 2010; and how much funding his Department has allocated to each project in each of the next five years.

HM Government has fully committed £10 million to deliver and evaluate the Natural Environment Investment Readiness Fund (NEIRF). Of this funding, £7.5 million will have been spent by the end of the 2022-23 financial year, with a further £2.5 million allocated for the 2023-24 financial year.

Natural England is supporting delivery of projects that will contribute to the Nature Recovery Network. This includes a budget in 2022/23 of £1.9 million for 12 landscape-scale Nature Recovery Projects and £680,000 in seed-corn funding to local projects. Wider work, such as for protected sites and species recovery, will also contribute.

Spend under the 2007-13 and 2014-20 Rural Development Programme for England (which includes the delivery of Countryside Stewardship and CS Capital Grants) is detailed below:

Landscape Recovery launched earlier this year (2022), and as such no funding has been spent in 21-22 or in any prior year. We have confirmed the 22 projects selected for the first round of project development phase and these will be awarded a share of circa £12 million to help finalise their delivery plans over the next two years. Learning from the initial rounds will help us refine the full scheme design.

We will not have fixed future allocations (or 'pillars', as they were known whilst we were in the EU) of money ring-fenced to different schemes. Instead, we will learn as we go and find the best ways to manage the overall farming budget to respond to demand in a way that helps us achieve our intended outcomes. This means we will keep the allocation of funding between different schemes under review over time.

The £750 million Nature for Climate Fund will support peat restoration, woodland creation and management until 2025. Nature for Climate Fund deployment in future years is dependent on analysis of previous year's performance across projects and workstreams.

Funding is agreed parliament to parliament via spending review periods, so beyond 2025 when the Nature for Climate Fund draws to a close, funding is yet to be agreed and determined.