Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what (a) changes he plans to make to and (b) estimate he has made of the level of participation in the Countryside Stewardship Scheme from 2022.
Uptake of the latest round of Countryside Stewardship (CS) has been encouraging and Defra has committed to offering a further round of CS in 2022.
CS is a proven mechanism for delivering environmental outcomes. The 2022 CS offer will remain familiar to farmers and land managers, but with improvements. This includes making it easier and simpler to apply, making modest changes to keep the scheme relevant to current environmental priorities and providing flexibility for customers to move to the new Environmental Land Management scheme, when it is rolled out. We will make more details available in due course.