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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what estimate he has made of the potential number of upland farmers that will go out of business in the transition away from Basic Payments Schemes.

We know that many farmers in the uplands currently rely on Direct Payments. That is why we have designed policies to allow for a managed adjustment, a seven-year transition, that will give farmers, including in upland areas, time to adapt to the changes.

Farmers will be able to offset the removal of these payments in a number of ways, including farm efficiency improvements, diversification and receiving money under our new environmental land management schemes.

There is clear evidence showing that the scope for productivity improvement would enable farms, on average, to remain profitable following the withdrawal of the current payments. We are providing grants and targeted resilience support to facilitate that, as well as investing in longer term measures such as research and development. We also anticipate rent adjustments which could benefit upland tenant farmers.

We are planning to publish further analysis by autumn this year. This will analyse farm incomes and how these will change between now and 2027.

Our latest preliminary findings are consistent with previous analysis that is publicly available, and we find that uplands farmers are reliant on Direct Payments, to the extent that their Direct Payments make up essentially all of their annual profit or farm business income.

However, the analysis also shows that there are opportunities for upland farmers. For instance, uplands farmers currently provide significant environmental benefits and will be well placed to benefit as more public money shall be provided through environmental land management payments.