Stephen Morgan

In summer 2024, we inherited a sustainable farming incentive scheme from the previous Conservative Government that had no budget control and no proper alignment of SFI actions to environmental sustainability targets. The farming schemes were underspent, meaning that millions of pounds were not going to farming businesses. This Government implemented many improvements to the sustainable farming incentive 2026 to make it more focused, more transparent and fairer, so that as many farmers as possible could benefit from agreements. For example, we introduced the new rule that each farm business could have only one SFI26 agreement, which cannot exceed £100,000 per year. We also streamlined the number of SFI actions to remove complexity while still having plenty of actions available for all farm types. We held the first application window earlier in the summer, which was open only to two groups: small farms and farms without existing environmental land management revenue agreements. Window 2 of the sustainable farming incentive 2026 opened on the morning of Tuesday 22 September 2026 and closed at 3.48 pm on the same day. It was open to all farmers and land managers with at least three hectares of agricultural land. I recognise that some farmers who wanted to join SFI26 will be disappointed not to have secured an agreement this year. There was exceptional demand for SFI26, which demonstrates farmers’ desire to invest in the environment, because healthy soils and thriving habitats are fundamental to farm profitability, productivity, sustainability and resilience. In anticipation of high demand, we allocated an additional £20 million to window 2 on top of the £50 million announced by the Prime Minister in August so that we could fund as many agreements as possible. We have therefore allocated a total of £310 million to nearly 19,000 new agreements across both application windows in SFI26, including £253 million and 12,200 new agreements through window 2. We now have 70,000 multi-year environmental land management scheme agreements in place. Those agreements will invest a total of £930 million in environmentally sustainable farming over the next three years. That is nearly £1 billion of investment in nature-friendly farming as part of £11.8 billion in funding for sustainable farming in this Parliament. We plan to offer an SFI scheme in 2027, and we will look to open the 2027 offer as early as possible to ensure that farmers can access funding. We are already looking to make changes to improve the SFI for next year, continuing our close work with farmers and stakeholders by listening to experiences and learning lessons from this window. In keeping with the commitments made in “Farming Roadmap 2050”, we plan to offer an SFI scheme in 2027. As part of that, we will scrap the first come, first served application process. We will look to open the 2027 window as early as possible to ensure that farmers can access funding and we will work with farming representative organisations including the National Farmers Union to consider how we refine the scheme for SFI27. As set out in the farming road map published earlier this year, the Government are committed to a farming sector that is productive, profitable and resilient.