UK Backs Up to £500 Million in Agricultural Lending Through Oxbury Guarantee

The British Business Bank has agreed a new ENABLE Guarantee transaction of up to £500 million with specialist agricultural lender Oxbury Bank, creating a larger financing channel for small and medium-sized farming businesses across England, Scotland and Wales.

The government-owned development bank said on September 24 that the facility is intended to support agricultural term lending for investments in farm operations, productivity and long-term growth. The structure is the British Business Bank's largest single-facility exposure to date.

Institutional capital enters specialist farm lending

Under the transaction, the British Business Bank will guarantee the senior position while Davidson Kempner Capital Management provides the junior investment. Oxbury retains a portion of the credit risk across the underlying lending agreements. The structure matters because it brings institutional capital into a specialist agricultural lending market that can be difficult for generalist lenders to assess.

The agreement also continues a pricing incentive for Oxbury lending that meets sustainability metrics, including reductions in carbon emissions or the use of renewable energy. That links the cost of the financing structure to measurable changes in farm investment rather than treating sustainability as a separate grant programme.

A much larger successor to the earlier guarantee

The new transaction follows a £100 million ENABLE Guarantee announced in 2023 and subsequently expanded to £300 million. According to the British Business Bank, that earlier arrangement has facilitated more than £425 million of finance for over 400 small and medium-sized farming businesses. The Bank has also invested £35 million in Oxbury through Tier 2 capital facilities since 2022.

For farm businesses, the practical significance is access to specialist long-term finance for machinery, infrastructure, storage, automation and other capital-intensive projects whose returns may take years to materialize. Oxbury says its model combines agricultural lending expertise with its Oxbury Earth digital platform, which blends financial, agronomic and environmental data.

Why it matters for UK agriculture

The transaction arrives as farmers face pressure to raise productivity while absorbing volatile input costs and financing investments in more resilient production systems. Government-backed risk sharing can increase the amount of private lending available without turning the development bank into the direct lender to individual farms.

The British Business Bank said the programme is designed to crowd private capital into smaller-business lending. In this transaction, that means public backing of the senior risk position, private institutional participation in the junior position and continued risk retention by the agricultural lender itself.

Primary source: British Business Bank, press release dated September 24, 2026.