RPA system downtime
The RPA carried out some system updates on 1 January 2025 and encouraged in-flight SFI applicants to submit their applications by 31 December 2024 ahead of time.
If you didn’t submit your application by this date, your application will remain on the system but you will need to double check nothing has changed such as fields lost, or actions moved. The RPA has written to in-flight SFI applicants.
The RPA has also made us aware of a number of actions applicants need to take depending on which stage of the application process they’re at.
SFI ‘expanded offer’ applications
For many applicants submitting their SFI expanded offer application may be the last stage of the application process, there are a number of situations where more work needs to be done by the applicant or the RPA before an agreement can be issued.
Two areas where such activity is needed are set out below.
Land in SSSIs (site of special scientific interest)
If you plan to use eligible land that’s an SSSI in the SFI, then you must give notice to Natural England to get consent.
You must do this before you start work on the any actions, unless the SFI action is exempt or you already have suitable SSSI consent.
The RPA will only offer you an SFI agreement when Natural England confirms that either:
- your SSSI consent notice has been received or
- you already have appropriate SSSI consent in place.
It is therefore important to consider this requirement when you are making your application, or soon after you have submitted it to the RPA to avoid any hold ups to receiving your agreement.
If you accept your SFI agreement offer then bear in mind that your agreement can start before you receive SSSI consent from Natural England, but you must not start actions on the SSSI land until you receive SSSI consent – if you do, it will be a breach of your agreement.
For more information, refer to Section 10.3 of the SFI guidance.
Endorsed actions
Currently there is only one endorsed SFI action – species rich grassland action (GHR6) where you need to get written consent approving its location suitability.
A further 14 endorsed actions are planned to be in place in summer 2025.
If you apply for the current endorsed action now within your application then please be aware that the length of time from submitting your application to having an agreement offer will be longer than an application that does not have this action included.
Therefore, you may want to consider splitting out this action from any others you want to apply for and make two applications.
With endorsement of this current action, a Natural England adviser (or an adviser approved by Natural England to act on their behalf) will contact you about the endorsement process for the action – they may need to visit your land to confirm it’s suitable for the selected endorsed SFI action.
Before that happens you apply for SFI as normal. You will not receive an agreement offer until you have got the required endorsement.
If Natural England do not think your land is suitable for the selected endorsed SFI action it will inform you that it cannot give you the required endorsement and the affected SFI action will not be included in your agreement offer issued by the RPA.
The final point to make is that endorsement described here is not the same as regulatory consents, permissions and licences, which you must get separately, where relevant.
For more information, refer to the SFI guidance.
SFI 2023 agreements
For those who have an SFI 2023 agreement(s) in place, remember to complete the following activity towards the end of the first agreement year.
The RPA will contact you about the following:
Agreement annual declarations
Your annual declaration for your agreement looks back at your first year and, where applicable, after you have completed this annual declaration you will need to complete a rotational actions declaration.
Rotational actions declaration
Agreement holders need to confirm to the RPA where their rotational actions are for Year 2 of their agreement.
To help, the RPA has provided a useful blog on this subject: GOV.UK | Understanding the SFI rotational actions declaration.
The RPA needs to know of any area changes post Year 1 for rotational actions as payments are made on a per hectare basis.
A variation between years of rotational action areas will affect both the total and quarterly payments due and possibly the SFI management payment if a relevant agreement area increases up to 50ha or falls below this level.
In both of the situations outlined above, if the declarations are not returned, this would hold up any future payments that are due.
