HEFER for ELM pilot

The purchase will develop a new online service to support the phase 1 pilot of the new Sustainable Farming Incentive, the entry level component of the new Environmental Land Management Scheme. The SFI is being piloted in spring/summer 2021, ahead of national rollout to 70k plus land holdings in 2022.

The pilot involves c.1000 farmers selecting from a range of environment standards to apply across their holding. These standards include actions which could be detrimental to historic environment features if inappropriately located, which has been flagged as a risk by Historic England. To address this concern, DEFRA have requested that applicants should receive baseline information and guidance about designated and undesignated heritage features on their land holdings to inform option choice and avoid potential breaches of the 1979 Act.

The project will also develop an application programming interface (API) for sharing historic environment data with other land management applications.