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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what assessment his Department has made of the potential financial effect for farmers of the replacement of the Basic Payment Scheme with the Sustainable Farming Incentive and Environmental Land Management schemes.

We will soon be announcing the initial standards that we will be offering to farmers in the Sustainable Farming Incentive scheme for 2022. The scheme will expand over time and evolve to deliver continued progress against our climate and environmental priorities, while encouraging sustainable food production and reflect any changes to the regulatory baseline.

The scheme will give farmers an opportunity to secure a complementary income stream to their farm business by undertaking sustainable farming actions that benefit the wider environment.

It will be up to individual farmers to decide which standards they take up on their farm and how much of their land they decide to put into the Sustainable Farming Incentive scheme, alongside other agri-environment schemes that such as Countryside Stewardship or Environmental Stewardship.

The Local Nature Recovery and Landscape Recovery schemes which farmers and landowner swill also be able to take part in will be piloted in 2022, in advance of launch in 2024.