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

To ask Her Majesty's Government whether applications for the new Local Nature Recovery scheme and the Landscape Recovery Scheme will take account of whether potential recipients are already in receipt of funding from existing DEFRA payment schemes or other environmental land management schemes.

As set out in our payment principles document published in June 2021, we aim to support the stacking of multiple public schemes and public and private finance so long as schemes are compatible, pay for different or additional outcomes and do not pay for the same action twice.

On 6 January 2022 we published further information on both Local Nature Recovery and Landscape Recovery.

This included the broad themes that Local Nature Recovery will pay for and more detail on how it will work. This publication also confirmed that we will continue working with stakeholders to develop the detailed scheme rules for Local Nature Recovery. We will finalise and publish these as soon as possible to allow people to plan their participation in the scheme.

The publication also included initial information on the criteria for the first round of Landscape Recovery pilot projects. It confirmed that we will launch the application process shortly including publishing full guidance for applicants. This guidance will cover detailed information on how bids will be assessed and how the scheme will work for the selected projects. Projects will have 16 weeks to prepare their applications before the application window closes. Applications will then be assessed against our selection criteria and we will confirm the chosen first round pilot projects this summer.