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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, whether he has plans to review the effectiveness of the Environmental Land Management scheme.

The Impact and Value for Money Evaluation of ELM is a vital component of our reporting commitment under the Agriculture Act (2020) and it builds 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 and research specialists. We are in the process of both developing and delivering on our monitoring and evaluation plans for each of the Environmental Land Management schemes, recognising the phased rollout of the schemes.

More specifically, in the Sustainable Farming Incentive pilot, land managers are supported through monitoring and site visits to track how they are delivering their outcomes, with final reporting on the impact and value for money of the SFI pilot being delivered in 2025. Monitoring and evaluation of the SFI23 offer is underway, working closely with land managers to understand their experiences in the scheme and their ability to deliver effectively, and this year we will begin utilising a mixed methods research approach using field surveys, modelling and expert assessments of the effectiveness of the sustainable management achieved under the scheme to assess the impact of this offer. Countryside Stewardship has a long history of impact monitoring and evaluation, with data collected spanning nearly 25 years for some holdings within the scheme. This work continues and will adapt and combine with the SFI monitoring and evaluation programme as the Combined Offer is realised. Within Landscape Recovery, each project is responsible for developing and delivering on their monitoring, evaluation, and learning strategy and there is also scheme-level monitoring and evaluation which is helping us learn about scheme effectiveness to enable ongoing improvements. Cross-cutting impact monitoring and evaluation will utilise various methods to establish the aggregate impacts of the schemes over the long-term and help determine the value for money of ELM as a whole.