Last month I met with local farmers and hosted a roundtable discussion with the Rural Payments Agency (RPA) and Forestry Commission to talk about grant schemes, woodland management, successes and ongoing challenges farmers face.

There was some excellent feedback from local farmers about the lack of long-term funding, and struggles with the year-to-year changes in subsidy application processes which gave them much less certainty for the future, and some logistical challenges in getting these lengthy applications completed and submitted on time in shot timescales.

I said I would write to the Secretary of State for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to raise the difficulties in Natural England capacity to get their feasibility studies completed as part of the subsidy application process, along with the automatic timeouts on application systems – and I have done just that.

You can see my letter below: