Wales Integrated Natural Resources Scheme (INRS) — GBP 10m collaborative land-management subsidy registered under UK subsidy control

Mechanism

The INRS is a Welsh Government grant scheme enabling farmers, foresters, land managers and associated rural sectors to work together at a landscape, catchment, or pan-Wales level on nature-based land-management projects, under the Sustainable Land Management objectives set out in the Agriculture (Wales) Act 2023. Funded activities include tree planting and woodland management, hedgerow restoration, invasive non-native species removal, natural flood-risk management, wetland/riparian habitat creation, upland and peatland restoration, and targeted water-quality and soil-health measures. Grants are awarded at Welsh Government standard costs, with project-delivery awards of GBP 250,000-1,000,000. The scheme is explicitly positioned as separate from, but feeding into, the Collaborative Layer of the Sustainable Farming Scheme (see 2025-12-18-uk-wales-sustainable-farming-scheme-universal-layer for the SFS Universal Layer, filed separately).

Note: Global Trade Alert's state-act record for this intervention cites an GBP 80 million scheme value and a 21 May 2025 announcement date; neither figure appears in the Welsh Government's own subsidy-control filing, which is the authoritative document under the UK's post-Brexit subsidy control regime and states a GBP 10 million budget. This filing uses the primary source's confirmed figures rather than GTA's secondary characterisation.

Why severity 1

A small (GBP 10m), domestic, non-discriminatory land-management grant scheme with no tariff, export-control, or foreign-targeting dimension. It sits alongside the Wales SFS Universal Layer and other production-support filings in the food-security-production-subsidies theme as a low-severity continuation of domestic agri-environment support rather than a trade-restrictive or step-change industrial-policy instrument.

Downstream implications

• Feeds SFS Collaborative Layer — INRS project outcomes are designed to

inform the eventual Collaborative Layer of the Sustainable Farming Scheme, complementing the GBP 238m Universal Layer already in the register.

• No cross-border trade effect — GTA lists no affected foreign

countries for this state act; it is a pure domestic transfer programme.

Open questions

• Whether the GTA-cited GBP 80m figure reflects a since-superseded budget

allocation or a GTA data error; worth re-checking if a later Welsh Government update revises the SC11324 budget line upward.

• Uptake data once the December 2024-March 2028 scheme window progresses

further (current record reflects the July 2025 subsidy-control snapshot).