Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps his Department is taking to ensure that landlords cannot take a disproportionate share of their tenant's delinked farm payments.

Eligibility for delinked payments will be based on a reference period. For example, it may be necessary to have claimed, and been eligible under the Basic Payment Scheme, in a particular scheme year or years. Where land is let to a tenant, it is the tenant and not the landlord who is eligible to use it to claim under Basic Payment Scheme. Similarly, we expect that tenants who received a Basic Payment Scheme payment during the reference period will usually be eligible to receive a delinked payment. We are consulting with the industry on the detail of how delinked payments will work.