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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what recent progress she has made on resolving Basic Payment Scheme claims which include common land.

All eligible farmers have received a payment on their 2015 BPS claim apart from exceptional cases, such as those that cannot be paid for legal reasons like probate.

Making payments on large commons has proved challenging in the first year of BPS. This was down to multiple and often very large land parcels, many commoners claiming BPS and a complicated historical allocation of grazing rights.