The main application window for the £233m Sustainable Farming Incentive slammed shut in just over five hours.
Published 16th Oct 2026, 06:00 BST
The Government has been told it should scrap the Sustainable Farming Incentive and “start again” after almost three-quarters of farmers missed out on funds in a “Glastonbury ticket scramble” for money.
The £233m scheme pays farmers in England for “public goods” such as insecticide-free farming, wildflower strips and managing ponds and hedgerows.
The window for the vast majority of applicants in 2026 slammed shut in less than six hours last month, after the fund was entirely allocated.
The Department for the Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs had spent more than a year reforming the scheme, which previous secretary of state Emma Reynolds had claimed would be “simpler, fairer and more stable”.
The first-come, first serve policy, according to the National Farmers’ Union, saw “the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’ in the sector based purely on the speed of pressing a button”.
Responding in the Commons yesterday to an urgent question from Keighley and Ilkley MP Robbie Moore, Farming Minister Stephen Morgan said he was “sorry if people applied for the scheme and were unsuccessful”.
He pledged that next year’s SFI would no longer be first-come, first-served, something that he said mirrored the previous Tory incarnations.
Mr Morgan added: “We will look to open the 2027 window as early as possible to ensure that farmers can access funding and we will work with farming representative organisations including the National Farmers Union to consider how we refine the scheme for SFI27.
“As set out in the farming road map published earlier this year, the Government are committed to a farming sector that is productive, profitable and resilient.”
Mr Moore, who is also the Shadow Farming Minister, revealed that almost three-quarters of applicants missed out.
He said: “I cannot stress enough just how badly mishandled the sustainable farming incentive has been under this Labour Government.
“After 18 months of inaction following the Government’s choice to close the scheme in March 2025, for the first time ever the scheme was changed to operate on a first come, first served basis, making it competitive with no quality control.
“It was simply based on who could press ‘Send’ first. The consequence was a build-up of nearly 40,000 farmers trying to get into the scheme when it finally opened, and only 12,200 were successful.
“Farmers had been designing their applications for months, and many are now under more financial and emotional strain.”
Liberal Democrat rural affairs spokeswoman Sarah Dyke described the SFI as a “Glastonbury ticket scramble” for payments.
She said that removing the first-come, first-served system for a new type of queue “for the same small pot, just changes who gets turned away”, as she called for Chancellor John Healey to consider ploughing more money into farming when he sets his first Budget on October 28.
Meanwhile, Labour’s Penrith and Solway MP Markus Campbell-Savours said: “Isn’t it time we simply admit that the SFI experiment has failed?
“The last government couldn’t get the money out the door, we now have an IT system so bad we may as well not have a door.
“Farmers don’t believe it’s fair – they don’t believe it’s getting to those that need support, or believe it’s delivering the public goods it’s stated to.
“Perhaps we should start again, reconsider a universal baseline with best practice conditions.”