Environmental Land Management Schemes

(asked on 5th December 2022) - View Source

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

To ask His Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the ability of tenant farmers to benefit from Environmental Land Management Schemes.


Answered by
Lord Benyon Portrait
Lord Benyon
Minister of State (Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office)
This question was answered on 30th December 2022

We are designing the schemes to be simple, flexible, fair and accessible to as many types of farmers and land managers as possible, including tenant farmers. We are aiming to remove barriers to tenants entering schemes where possible, such as in the Sustainable Farming Incentive where tenants can enter without their landlord's explicit consent and tenants with annually renewing tenancy agreements can enter if they expect to have management control for the duration of their 3-year agreement. The independent Rock Review on the tenanted sector, led by Baroness Rock, noted that SFI’s agreement length and no penalty exits when management control of the land is lost unexpectedly have made the scheme more open to tenant farmers. The first round of Landscape Recovery was open to any land manager or groups of land managers, including tenant farmers, that could pull together a 500 to 5,000 hectare project of broadly contiguous land in England - around half of the 22 projects selected for round one involve tenant farmers. We are monitoring how these schemes are working for tenants and any impacts on tenants as part of the schemes' Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning.

The Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs announced on 1st December that rather than delivering the new Local Nature Recovery scheme as previously planned, we would build on the success of the existing Countryside Stewardship scheme to achieve the ambitious outcomes we had intended to deliver through Local Nature Recovery. This evolution was recommended by the Tenancy Working Group in the early conversations with Defra, with the group stating that many tenants were comfortable and familiar with CS. We are continuing to develop the Countryside Stewardship scheme, the Sustainable Farming Incentive and Landscape Recovery schemes through co-design with stakeholders, farmers, foresters, and other experts while considering the recommendations of the Rock Review to inform our decisions on tenanted land in these schemes.

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