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

To ask His Majesty's Government how tenant farms will benefit under the Environmental Land Management Schemes.

As we said in response to Baroness McIntosh of Pickering’s question HL4012 on 30 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, and have done this already in the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) and Landscape Recovery schemes. Ensuring tenants can benefit from the scheme is one of our design criteria for evolving the existing Countryside Stewardship (CS) scheme. We will say more about how tenants can benefit from the evolved Countryside Stewardship scheme in due course.

Like all farmers, tenant farmers in SFI will benefit from the new payment of £20/hectare for the first 50 hectares, in addition to the payments farmers will receive for delivering SFI standards, to cover the costs of taking part in this scheme. Tenant farmers will also benefit from the updated payment rates for CS for ongoing activities, and for one-off grants for new agreements. The median increase to the value of a CS agreement will be about 10%.