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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps her Department is taking to reduce approval process timescales for woodland planting.

Forestry is a devolved matter and the answer refers to England only.

We have improved the process for Countryside Stewardship applications for woodland creation in the 2016-17 planting season. Any amendments that may be required for existing Environmental Stewardship Schemes can be made earlier in this year than in previous years. The Rural Payments Agency has new systems for digitisation of land registration and parcel amendments to support smoother application processing. Scoring has been simplified and we have introduced a self-calculating and self-populating application form to ease the application process.