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Defra has announced up to £33 million will be directed to the Rural England Prosperity Fund (REPF) for the 2025/26 year. This money is available to improve local infrastructure and essential services that benefit rural communities and help businesses in rural areas. It is equivalent to the Rural Development funds that used to be paid […]
System Faults Further to Defra’s shock, without notice, closure of the SFI 2024, there were many situations where applications had started but had not yet been submitted. Defra has said for the majority of these it will not be possible to submit them. The only exceptions to this are ‘a small group of farmers who […]
The revised Countryside Stewardship Higher Tier (CSHT) offering will not be available until next summer. This news comes as part of a wider Defra announcement on the future of the scheme. Readers may recall CSHT was supposed to have been opening in autumn 2024 to allow claimants to ‘draw-up’ applications ready for an early 2025 […]
The Capital Grants scheme in England has been closed. We wrote last month that the scheme, which provides funding for enviromental work (previously known as Countryside Stewardship capital grants), had seemingly been ‘paused’ as no agreements had been offered for a number of months. The closure of the scheme was confirmed on the 26th November […]
The RPA has started to contact those that are due a Recovery Payment following the extreme wet weather last winter including Storm Babet in the autumn and Storm Henk in January 2024. The Environment Agency and Met Office data has been used as follows, to identify which farm businesses will receive the recovery payment. Data […]
Following the Budget, Defra has released further information on its farming support schemes for 2025. Details can be found in a Defra Blog post – https://defrafarming.blog.gov.uk/2024/10/30/budget-2024-maintaining-momentum/. Delinked Payments Following the Budget, Defra has announced the deductions to delinked (BPS) payments in England for 2025. Readers will recall we have been waiting to find out the […]
With delinking, English entitlements have disappeared (and thus have a nil value). The loss of the capital value can be offset against other gains for Capital Gains Tax. This is only the case where entitlements were purchased (or inherited) – either on their own or part of an overall land transaction. In the former case, […]
Policy Direction With the change of Government there could have been a change to agricultural policy, but the new Defra Ministers have confirmed that they are fully committed to Environmental Land Management (ELM) and they want to ‘maintain the momentum’ built up over recent months. Defra has said work is being carried out on how […]