Small farms in Yorkshire Dales will 'lose out' after SFI scheme closed, MPs warn

The SFI pays farmers in England for “public goods” such as insecticide-free farming, wildflower strips and managing ponds and hedgerows.

Food Security Minister Daniel Zeichner told the Commons yesterday that the Government planned to “redesign” the programme and said previous schemes had “no way of prioritising properly” the farmers who received support.

It is understood that a new scheme will be announced after the Spending Review in the summer.

Liberal Democrat environment, food and rural affairs spokesman Tim Farron told MPs that of 6,100 new SFI entrants this year, only 40 were hill farmers.

He asked: “Doesn’t this prove that because of the failure of the Conservatives in the last administration, the big landowners and the corporates are already comfortably inside the tent but the farmers who are outside are now locked out without warning, are Britain’s poorest farmers in Britain’s most beautiful places like mine in the Lakes and the Dales?”

Mr Farron also said the scheme’s closure would “outrage everyone who cares for our environment, for our upland nature and landscapes – it will outrage everyone who cares about food security, it will outrage everyone who cares about our tourism economy”.

Farming groups also reacted with fury to the news. National Farmers’ Union president Tom Bradshaw said: “This is another shattering blow to English farms, delivered yet again with no warning, no understanding of the industry and a complete lack of compassion or care.”

He said the industry had warned “time and time again” that large parts of the SFI were poorly designed, and he accused Defra of being a “failing department” with farmers left paying the price for chaos.

“The awful dilemma now faced by many farmers is whether to turn their backs on environmental work and just farm as hard as they can to survive.

“This is a loss to both farming and the environment and cannot be what was intended,” he said.

Country Land and Business Association president Victoria Vyvyan described it as the “most cruel” of the “betrayals” so far.

“It actively harms nature. It actively harms the environment.

“And, with war once again raging in Europe, to actively harm our food production is reckless beyond belief,” she said.

Martin Lines, chief executive of the Nature Friendly Farming Network, said that while it was good news so many farmers had joined agri-environmental schemes, many more had been prevented from doing so due to overly-complicated schemes and slow processing of applications.

The new SFI offer would not be available until spring 2026, leaving most farmers facing an 18-month gap before fresh payments “which is going to leave some of them in a really difficult financial position”, he warned.

“This has left many farmers feeling frustrated and let down, with no clear opportunity to be rewarded for delivering public goods in the near future,” he said.