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

To ask His Majesty's Government, further to the Written Answer by Lord Benyon on 29 March (HL6810), what steps they are taking to ensure that the backlog of 4,000 applications for historic rights of way are assessed in a timely manner; and what discussions the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has had with the Department for Levelling-up, Housing and Communities about the funding required by local authorities to consider those applications.

The final Local Government Finance Settlement for 2023/24 makes available up to £59.7 billion for local government in England, the majority of which is un-ringfenced in recognition of local authorities being best placed to understand local priorities and allocate funding accordingly.

The Government is committed to implementing the rights of way reforms package which will reduce bureaucracy and speed up the process for new rights of way to be added to the legal record for everyone to enjoy. The reforms will streamline processes for recording rights of way with landowners, local authorities and users benefitting from a faster, less expensive, less confrontational and less bureaucratic process.

Local authorities will have powers to reject weakly evidenced applications, ignore irrelevant objections and agree appropriate modifications directly with landowners. Local authorities will have powers to correct obvious administrative errors on the definitive map via a significantly shortened process.