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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, with reference to his comments at the speech to the Oxford farming Conference on 6 January 2022 that hedgerows are probably the single most important ecological building block in the farm landscape and that and how they are managed matters, how the new Local Nature Recovery scheme will be designed to support farmers to maintain and extend the network of hedgerows on their land.

Following our exit from the European Union, the development of our new environmental land management schemes will continue to recognise the role and fund the management of hedgerows.

Initially, the main offer for hedgerows will be the hedgerow standard, part of the new Sustainable Farming Incentive scheme, which is still under development but will pay farmers to plant more hedgerows and manage them sustainably, such as by leaving them uncut or raising the cutting height. We will be publishing further details on our future standards, what they will pay for and how much the payments will be, in due course.

Local Nature Recovery may offer some options which complement the Sustainable Farming Incentive hedgerow standard, for example, by managing habitat for targeted wildlife species on farms. We will publish more information on Local Nature Recovery later this year.