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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what assessment he has made of the role of public advice in the effective delivery of the proposed new Environmental Land Management Schemes.

We will be introducing a new Environmental Land Management (ELM) system that will pay land managers for delivering environmental public goods.

The government will work with farmers and land managers who wish to improve the environment by entering into multi-annual ELM contracts in which land managers commit to take certain actions to deliver environmental goods and benefits in return for funding.

We believe that those managing the land are best placed to decide how to deliver the environmental benefits they have signed up to provide. We propose that land managers should have access to the information and advice they need to enable them to develop holistic management plans for their land.

Evidence from previous agri-environment schemes suggests that the effectiveness of measures and the quality of environmental benefits can depend on the quality and extent of advice from trusted advisers. We propose that an approved specialist adviser should be readily available to help the land manager to deliver desirable environmental outcomes. We want land managers to establish trusted relationships with their adviser. We are therefore exploring the role that third party advisers could play. For example, an adviser could be an agronomist who a farmer has worked with in the past and trusts, or an adviser from a local organisation who can advise on local conditions. We expect that these advisers would need to be approved to demonstrate their level of capability and to ensure sufficient protection for the spending of public money. The appetite for existing advisers training to deliver advice within ELM, and the market for delivering this training, is being tested through a combination of policy development, Testing and Trials and social science involvement, with an intelligence assessment in development.