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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps she is taking to incentivise deer management by local landowners at a landscape scale.

Defra provides a wide range of support to help landowners and managers tackle deer impacts on woodlands. This includes grants for managing their impacts and for capital items, as well as funding of relevant projects, including those that facilitate landscape scale action.

A dedicated Forestry Commission team of Deer Officers is in place, providing nationwide advice, facilitating grant support and encouraging landscape scale collaborative management.

Natural England are leading the Sussex Woods Protected Sites Strategy pilot, focused on reducing deer impacts on protected woodlands, which includes supporting landowners and managers to work together at scale to manage deer impacts.

We are considering plans for further action on deer impacts management and will outline these, including any implications for the existing regime for the licensing of managing deer at night, in due course.