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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps his Department is taking to (a) help optimise the (i) combination, (ii) scale and (iii) location of the take up of Environmental Land Management (ELM) options for nature recovery targets and (b) ensure that any potential simplification of the ELM scheme design does not affect the UK's ability to meet nature recovery targets.

We set out how we will deliver outcomes for food, farming and the environment through our Environmental Land Management (ELM) schemes in an update in January. This can be found at Environmental Land Management (ELM) update: how government will pay for land-based environment and climate goods and services. This includes our plans to expand and refine the schemes to contribute more to our environmental targets, including on nature recovery, and to target funding towards actions in places where they can have the biggest impacts, in ways that are joined up across larger areas, and that are designed to deliver the required results.

Since then we have launched the 2023 Sustainable Farming Incentive and further rounds of Countryside Stewardship and Landscape Recovery. We will publish more details on the 2024 offer in due course.