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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what recent progress his Department has made towards developing a new regulatory regime to be implemented once cross-compliance ends in 2024.

Defra has been working to ensure we deliver fair, effective regulation of farming and maintain our important environmental and animal health standards. All Defra group regulators have been involved in creating a better shared regulatory approach. Recent improvements include:

• publication of a single navigation page for rules for farmers on GOV.UK, developed with farmers, making it easier to find out what rules apply
• increasing the advice offered by the Farming Advice Service so we can reach more farmers.
• expanding the regulatory resource for the Environment Agency with a test and learn approach on how we best enable compliance.
• opening Round 2 of our slurry infrastructure grant, as part of our commitment to spend over £200m on infrastructure and equipment grants to help to help livestock farmers in England tackle pollution from slurry.
• consulting on how we can best protect hedgerows as we phase out farm subsidies and cross compliance rules.

As part of the Shared Regulatory Approach, we have worked with:

• the Environment Agency in how it supports farmers to undertake farming activities in a way that minimises risk to environmental outcomes
• Natural England in how it helps farmers protect and enhance Protected Sites and biodiversity
• the Rural Payments Agency and the Animal and Plant Health Agency in how they help farmers to protect the health of our plants and animals and to maintain biosecurity
• the Forestry Commission in how it helps farmers protect and enhance our trees and woodlands.