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 support farmers and fishermen suffering from mental health problems.

The mental health of all sections of the population, including farmers and fishermen, is one of this Government’s top priorities. The Government is committed to transforming mental health services and has announced a further expansion in the NHS Long Term Plan funded by an additional £2.3 billion a year in real terms by 2023/24. Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) are best placed to decide on how our investment in mental health services should be used locally to meet the needs of their populations living in rural and coastal areas. CCGs are responsible for ensuring adequate access to mental health services locally, including early interventions such as mental health first aid. Funding allocations to CCGs, including those covering rural areas, vary to meet the needs of local populations, including mental health need and the needs of remote or sparsely populated areas.

The Government takes the issue of farmers’ wellbeing very seriously and is committed to supporting the wellbeing of farmers, incorporating wellbeing into future agricultural policy. We recognise this is a time of uncertainty and are designing our farming reforms in collaboration with those who work in agriculture wherever we can, considering personal and business resilience issue. We meet regularly with representatives from the main farming and rural charities. We have launched a £1 million grant funding project to provide resilience support to farmers and land managers in England to help them prepare for the Agricultural Transition period that will take place from 2021-2027. A range of providers will work directly with farmers providing business and personal resilience support and we will learn lessons from this project, using the accumulated evidence and on-going feedback from the industry to help us develop any next steps for any future initiatives and support.

On fisheries, Defra is providing support to SeafarersUK in a research project called ‘The financial health and resilience of small-scale fishers, their families and communities’. Defra’s grant will help SeafarersUK to widen the scope of the research on this important topic in order to understand better the type of financial problems fishers experience, their underlying reasons and what could be done to support fishers become more financially/economically resilient. This will include consideration of the high levels of poor mental health among fishing communities.