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

To ask His Majesty's Government what steps they will take, if any, to introduce private finance to farming and nature recovery budgets.

Defra published the Land Use Framework in March this year. The Framework set out the steps Government will take to increase private demand for the environmental services that farmers and land managers provide and ensure that public payments can be combined with private payments as recommended by the Corry Review.

The Landscape Recovery (LR) scheme pilot phase will help Defra understand how much private finance projects are able to secure from private nature markets and what areas of projects that funding supports. Defra will apply that learning across LR and other schemes where appropriate.

Defra will publish the Farming Roadmap later this year. It will set out the role of private finance alongside public funding in supporting farms to profitably meet environmental outcomes and increase long term productivity.