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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, whether she has made an assessment of the potential merits of lowering the annual cap for SFI payments to support small farms to use the scheme.

For SFI26, we introduced a £100,000 annual agreement value cap to help spread funding across more farms. We expected around 97% of farmers would not be affected by the cap (if we had the same cap in SFI24 only 3% of agreements would have exceeded the cap). We also gave priority access through Window 1 to small farms and farms without existing Environmental Land Management revenue agreements. We are continuing to work closely with farmers and stakeholders on how we can improve SFI for 2027.