Defra promises to speed up SFI offer rollout ‘soon’

Defra has promised to speed up its processing of Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) applications, citing the detailed checking process rather than budgetary pressures for the slow delivery so far.

Farmers have raised concerns in recent weeks that their applications seem to have hit a brick wall, with long waits for agreement offers to come back, and further delays to them going live if accepted.

See also: Farmers frustrated by slow rollout of 2024 SFI scheme

This has promoted suggestions that the process is being slowed deliberately, while Defra waits to see if its resources are cut following the 30 October Budget.

But addressing a Tenant Farmers Association webinar this week, Defra farming and countryside director Janet Hughes dismissed the suggestion, blaming extended checks by the Rural Payments Agency (RPA).

“When we roll out an extended offer or a new offer, we do it in a controlled way initially,” she said.

“We have added a lot of actions, basically merging Mid-Tier Countryside Stewardship into SFI this year.

“It is a big expansion of the SFI offer, and when we do that, we control it much more closely for the first period. We check every single agreement.”

Automated process

Ms Hughes said the RPA was nearly ready to dispense with this previous approach and move to a more automated way of processing SFI applications and agreements. “We will start going faster over the next period,” she said.

As for the numbers, Ms Hughes confirmed that, so far, the RPA has received about 12,000 expressions of interest, and has issued roughly 11,000 invitations to apply for SFI.

“We’ve had about 3,000 applications submitted and RPA has issued somewhere in the region of 700 agreements,” she added.

“So they are going out, and that will speed up over the next few weeks. We’re not holding back on them for money reasons.”

Higher Tier schemes

Ms Hughes also apologised for delays to the introduction of Higher-Tier Countryside Stewardship, which she blamed on the general election.

“We will get that information out in the next couple of months. Then we’ll start taking applications as soon as we can in 2025,” she said.

Farmers wanting to move from Higher Level Stewardship (HLS) legacy schemes into SFI could do so, she added, but the process was very bureaucratic.

A more automated “touch-of-the-button” system would be available in 2025, so anyone wanting to move now was advised to contact the RPA.

Adding SFI options to existing HLS agreements was passible in a limited number of cases, Ms Highes added, but this was not easy as the HLA operated on a “whole farm” basis, so the RPA did not really know what actions were already being taken on individual parcels of land.

“There is a bit of stacking in SFI that you can do on HLS, but really, if you want to do the stuff in SFI, the thing to do is probably move across as and when the more automated approach to that is available next year,” she said.