Opinion: Defra’s handling of SFI26 is an absolute ‘shambles’

The handling of the second SFI26 application window, which opened and closed on Tuesday 22 September, can only be described as one thing. A shambles.

For farmers and growers already lying awake at night, worrying about cashflow after the hottest summer on record or about livestock threatened by bluetongue, this could be the final straw.

To everyone facing that uncertainty, our message is clear: we hear you, we see you and we will continue to fight for you.

See also: Budgets show SFI vital to farm financial performance

You needed certainty, consistency and cash. Instead, you got confusion, instability and another financial blow.

And the farmers who have spent years delivering for the environment through these schemes have been left stranded.

The NFU warned Defra for months that this would happen. We repeatedly made clear that the 22,000 farmers and growers with expiring agreements would want to continue the work they had started.

The value of those expiring agreements alone exceeds £500m. Yet the budget for the second window they could access was just £253m, even after the prime minister’s additional £50m “drought” funding in August and a surprise £20m added to the pot on the day. It came nowhere close to meeting the need.

Anyone with a basic understanding of a balance sheet could see the problem coming. Farmers and growers can certainly see it now, in their own accounts and in the increasingly difficult decisions they face.

Government failed to act. It must now explain what has happened to the remainder of the budget. Some £200m that was intended for farm businesses delivering for the environment cannot simply have vanished.

Solutions

In meeting after meeting with officials, the Defra farming minister and the secretary of state, we repeatedly pressed for transparency over the SFI budget and put forward practical solutions.

If controls were needed to manage the budget, a per-hectare limit on agreement values would have been a fairer approach and reduced the risk of creating a system of winners and losers.

That was not acted upon. Now we have exactly what we warned against: farmers divided into the “haves” and the “have nots”.

A department that says it wants to reset its relationship with farmers, and has promised greater transparency, should be open about how this budget has been managed.

Without that openness, the mistrust many farmers already feel towards the department will only grow.

The farming minister’s response to the scheme’s rapid uptake suggests that further announcements will follow, including more detail on the next steps and the future SFI27 scheme.

We will press for the SFI27 application window to open to offer agreements in early 2027, with a budget that properly reflects the number and value of expiring agreements.

But promises about 2027 will provide little comfort to farmers and growers wondering whether their businesses will survive the next 12 months.

If the government wants viable farm businesses still standing when SFI27 arrives, it must act now.

It should back the Keep Britain Growing Loans, providing an interest-free injection of cash to the businesses hit hardest by this devastating summer and by the worst bluetongue outbreak to ever reach our shores.

That is the case we will take to the Labour Party Conference in the coming days.

The government says that food security is national security. But food security cannot be delivered through slogans.

It depends on farm businesses having the confidence, stability and financial strength to keep producing. If those businesses are allowed to fail, the nation’s food security fails with them.