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

To ask Her Majesty's Government what support they will give to land managers to track the outcomes of their engagement in Environmental Land Management schemes; and how they will evaluate the impact of Environmental Land Management schemes by comparing areas where land managers (1) are, and (2) are not, participating in such a scheme.

We are building on our experience of delivering, monitoring and evaluating agri-environment schemes over the last few decades, working closely with farmers, land managers and wider industry stakeholders to test, trial and pilot our approach to scheme design and delivery, including monitoring and evaluation.

We are in the process of establishing our monitoring and evaluation plans for each of the Environmental Land Management schemes. To ensure strength in design of our monitoring and evaluation we are using a mixed methods research approach, this includes consideration of how to compare between sites that our participating in schemes and those that are not. This will help us to understand what additionality and impact our schemes are delivering.

More specifically, in the Sustainable Farming Incentive pilot, land managers will be supported through monitoring and site visits to track how they are delivering their outcomes. Similar to our approach to monitoring Countryside Stewardship, we are using a combination of physical and virtual site visits, remote monitoring, and desk-based administrative checks. We are still designing our monitoring and evaluation plans for Local Nature Recovery. In the first round of Landscape Recovery, each project will be responsible for developing their monitoring, evaluation, and learning strategy. There will also be scheme-level monitoring, evaluation and learning which will help us learn about how the scheme is working and make improvements for later rounds of Landscape Recovery projects.