The Basic Payment Scheme has been dying slowly since 2023. It finishes on a cliff edge, not a gentle slope, and what replaces it is a genuinely different kind of scheme to apply into, not just a renamed cheque.
Delinked payments, what replaced the Basic Payment Scheme in England, are being phased out completely by 2027, a year sooner than originally planned. Many farmers saw the payment fall to around £7,200 in 2025, dropping to just £600 in both 2026 and 2027. The money is being redirected into Environmental Land Management: the Sustainable Farming Incentive, Countryside Stewardship+, and Landscape Recovery, backed by an average £2.3 billion a year between 2026-27 and 2028-29.
BPS itself stopped in 2023. What has been running since then is delinked payments, calculated from a farm's historic BPS average over 2020 to 2022, shrinking on a set schedule regardless of what the farm does today. That schedule has now been brought forward: 2027 is the final year delinked payments are paid at all, a year sooner than the original plan. The size of the payment by then makes the phase-out feel less like a taper and more like a cliff. Many farmers saw their delinked payment fall to around £7,200 in 2025, and it drops to just £600 in both 2026 and 2027, the last two years before it disappears entirely.
It has not disappeared from farming, it has been redirected. Since 2023, government policy has driven support through Environmental Land Management, ELM, built from three elements: the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI), Countryside Stewardship+ (CS+), and Landscape Recovery. Government has committed an average of £2.3 billion a year between 2026-27 and 2028-29 through the wider farming and countryside programme, and Countryside Stewardship funding specifically is set to increase by 150% to £2 billion by 2029. On paper, the total pot is not shrinking to nothing, it is being reshaped around land management outcomes rather than a flat area payment.
The practical difference for a working farm is real, though. A delinked payment required nothing beyond being the historic claimant, it landed regardless of what happened on the ground that year. ELM payments are earned through specific actions, hedgerow management, soil health work, habitat creation, each with its own application, evidence requirement, and ongoing record-keeping. Replacing one flat cheque with several outcome-based schemes is a genuinely different administrative relationship with the money, not a rebrand of the same one.
The most recent significant adjustment to the Sustainable Farming Incentive, referred to as SFI26, introduced a £100,000 annual agreement cap. The stated intention is to make the scheme fairer, simpler and more accessible, and specifically to help funding reach more farm businesses rather than concentrate in the very largest claims. Whether that cap changes your own position depends entirely on the size of your existing or planned agreement, worth checking directly against the current SFI guidance on GOV.UK rather than against last year's rules, since this is a scheme that keeps being adjusted rather than one that was designed once and left alone.
Don't treat SFI, Countryside Stewardship+ and Landscape Recovery as one application. They are three separate schemes with different entry points, evidence requirements and timelines, and the paperwork burden compounds if you leave working out which ones actually fit your farm until the delinked payment has already dropped to £600.
It is a common assumption that fewer subsidy schemes means less admin. The opposite has been true here. A flat delinked payment needed almost no ongoing paperwork once the initial claim was in. Stewardship-style schemes need evidence: photos, dated records, land management logs that prove the paid-for action actually happened, not just that it was promised. That extra record-keeping load is a real, measurable factor behind farmers reporting more office hours generally, not less, since BPS began winding down, covered in more depth in how many hours farm paperwork actually costs.
Farming representative bodies have been direct about the reaction. NFU described the further reduction in delinked payments as a genuine financial blow, and farmers have voiced frustration specifically over the £600 cap as the scheme closes out, a sharp drop from a payment that, whatever its flaws, was at least predictable. None of that changes the practical reality: for a farm planning its income for 2026 and 2027, delinked payments are no longer worth building a budget around, and the real question is which ELM elements the farm can realistically access, and how soon.
The practical takeaway is less about any single number and more about timing. A farm still budgeting around a meaningful delinked payment into 2027 is budgeting around a figure that has already shrunk to £600 and is about to disappear entirely, while an ELM application submitted late in the process can take months to actually start paying out. The gap between when the old money stops and when the new money starts is where a lot of the real financial pressure sits, not in the headline totals either scheme quotes. Farms that treat 2026 as the year to actually get an SFI or Countryside Stewardship+ agreement in place, rather than the year they finally have to, are the ones least likely to feel that gap directly.
The record-keeping ELM schemes actually demand, dated photos, land management logs, action evidence, is exactly the kind of paperwork FarmHQ is built to capture from a phone in the field rather than reconstructed from memory at claim time.
See how FarmHQ worksBPS itself ended in 2023, replaced by shrinking delinked payments based on historic 2020-22 averages. 2027 is now the final year those delinked payments are paid at all, a year sooner than originally planned.
Many farmers saw delinked payments fall to around £7,200 in 2025, dropping to just £600 in both 2026 and 2027, the final two years before the payment ends completely.
Environmental Land Management, ELM, built from three elements: the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI), Countryside Stewardship+ (CS+), and Landscape Recovery. Government has committed an average of £2.3 billion a year between 2026-27 and 2028-29 through the wider farming and countryside programme.
SFI26 introduced a £100,000 annual agreement cap, intended to make the scheme fairer, simpler and more accessible, and to spread funding across more farm businesses rather than concentrating it in the largest claims.