Minister of State (): We are undertaking
the most significant reform of agricultural policy and spending
in England in decades as we take England out of the Common
Agricultural Policy. We are phasing out unfair and
environmentally damaging farm subsidies, radically improving our
services to farmers, providing one-off grants to support farm
productivity, innovation, research and development, and
developing and expanding our schemes to pay farmers to provide
environmental goods and services alongside food production.
The reform is enabled by our manifesto commitment to guarantee an
average of £2.4 billion to farmers and landowners in each year of
this Parliament, with all funding released from Direct Payments
reductions to be made available through our new grants and
schemes.
The changes we are making are essential to help us grow and
maintain a resilient, productive agriculture sector over the long
term and at the same time achieve our ambitious targets for the
environment and climate, playing our role in tackling these huge,
global challenges. These reforms are about food and nature going
hand in hand for all farmers, with environmental goods and
services playing a key role in all farm businesses.
We have reviewed our plans for the Agricultural Transition,
considered feedback from the sector, and lessons learned from the
early stages of the agricultural transition. We are moving ahead
with the transition, on the same timescale, and pressing ahead
with our Environmental Land Management schemes, fine-tuning them
to make sure they help to deliver our ambitious outcomes on the
environment and support a thriving farming sector.
As I confirmed at Oxford Farming Conference last week, farmers
will receive increased payments for protecting and enhancing
nature and delivering sustainable food production.
Farmers could receive up to a further £1,000 per year for taking
nature-friendly action through the Sustainable Farming Incentive
(SFI). This new management payment will be made for the first 50
hectares of farm (£20/ha) in an SFI agreement, to cover the
administrative costs of participation and to attract smaller
businesses - many of whom are tenant farmers - who are currently
under-represented in the scheme.
Farmers with a Countryside Stewardship (CS) agreement will see an
average increase of 10% to their revenue payment rates – covering
ongoing activity such as habitat management. Defra is also
updating capital payment rates, which cover one-off projects such
as hedgerow creation, with an average increase of 48%. We expect
there to be 32,000 Countryside Stewardship agreements live at the
start of this year, a 94% increase from 2020.
Meanwhile, capital and annual maintenance payments for the
England Woodland Creation Offer (EWCO) will also see an increase
this year.
We will evolve the existing Countryside Stewardship scheme
instead of inventing a new ‘Local Nature Recovery’ scheme, to get
to the same destination of supporting farmers to contribute
towards net zero and biodiversity among other outcomes. This will
include expanding the scope of the scheme to pay for a wider
range of actions at a greater ambition, further improving the
service so it’s easy for farmers to apply and get paid and
targeting our funding through the scheme to where it’ll have the
biggest impact.
Taken together, these changes will mean we will support farmers
and landowners for making space for nature alongside sustainable
food production, contributing towards meeting the UK’s legally
binding environment targets such as halting and reversing
biodiversity loss by 2030, agreed at COP15 in December last year.
Later this month we’ll be publishing detailed information about
what we will pay for in our schemes, both this year and in
future, and how farmers will be able to get involved.
