Jenny Riddell-Carpenter

I will make progress, because I am coming on to something important. I want to address the issue of SFI26 frankly. I really do recognise the disappointment and frustration caused by the closure of the second application window on 22 September. The SFI is a scheme that the Government inherited from the previous Conservative Government. They designed this first come, first served scheme, sent a quarter of the money to 4% of farms and now complain that it was oversubscribed. When we inherited it, the scheme had no budget control and no proper alignment of SFI actions to environmental and sustainability targets, and it included that first come, first served application process. For 2026, we made improvements to the offer to ensure that more farmers could access funding. We made the offer simpler and more focused, with fewer actions while retaining actions for all farm types. We introduced a £100,000 per annum max agreement value cap to spread the availability of funding more widely. We also gave priority access to the scheme for small farms and farms without existing ELM revenue agreements. Those two groups had been under-represented in the SFI previously. This priority access through SFI26 window 1 remained open for two months. The SFI26 window 2 was open to all eligible farmers and land managers. It experienced exceptionally high demand and closed after around six hours once available budget had been allocated.