To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs what formal notifications and requests for revisions have been made in accordance with Articles 6-12 of Council Regulation 1974/2006 to amend the Rural Development Programme for England; and how many opportunities to notify the Commission of amendments remain in the programming period. (264749)

We have asked the European Commission to consider two amendments to the Rural Development Programme for England (RDPE) 2007-13 since it was approved in December 2007.

The first notification of a proposal to amend the programme was made in October 2008, principally to put in place a number of changes to our agri-environment scheme, Environmental Stewardship (ES), recommended by the ES Review of Progress, which was published in May 2008. A second notification was made in February 2009 and was made to put in place the changes to provide support for the uplands, as announced by the Secretary of State in December 2008, make additional ES options available for farmers in the Isles of Scilly, and to update the programme's state aid provisions. Neither of these amendments has yet been approved by the Commission.

The implementing rules (Commission Regulation (EC) No 1975/2006) allow us to propose up to four revisions to our programme in each calendar year until the programming period concludes at the end of 2013.