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

To ask His Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of (1) the business and financial challenges, and (2) the barriers to entry to the Sustainable Farming Incentive scheme, faced by tenant farmers; and what steps they intend to take in response.

Defra are aware of the challenges some tenant farmers face when seeking to enter our schemes, such as not having sufficient duration of management control to enter long scheme agreements, being limited by the terms of their tenancy agreement as to what actions they can carry out on the land and struggling to obtain their landlord's consent to enter such schemes.

We are aiming to remove barriers to tenants entering these schemes where possible and have already done so in the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI). Tenants can enter SFI without their landlord's explicit consent and tenants with annually renewing tenancy agreements can enter if they expect to have management control for the duration of their 3-year agreement. Furthermore, if a tenant unexpectedly loses management control of the land, such as when the landlord serves them a notice to quit, we do not require the tenant to pay a penalty to Defra for ending their SFI agreement early.

The recently published Rock Review led by Baroness Rock acknowledges that our policy on agreement length and no penalty exits when there is an unexpected loss of management control have made the scheme more open to tenant farmers. We are currently considering the Rock Review's recommendation that Defra must continue to design the future SFI standards so that they are open to tenant farmers and will formally respond to this recommendation in due course.