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

To ask Her Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the impact of a no deal Brexit outcome on upland farmers.

The UK is pursuing a bold and comprehensive economic partnership with the EU that provides the greatest possible tariff-free and frictionless trade.

In the event of a no deal Brexit, the UK will be free to determine its own trade policy and we will be able to set applied tariffs unilaterally on food imports at a rate of our choosing or to create Autonomous Tariff Rate Quotas. It is therefore difficult to model precise impacts since it would depend on the policy choices that both the UK and EU might make in the event of there being no deal.

The government is aware that the sheep sector is more dependent on access to the EU market than other sectors of British agriculture and that is why securing tariff free access for British lamb is our priority. However, in a no deal scenario where both the EU and UK apply tariffs at the Bound Tariff rate, a likely outcome would be that some mixed beef and sheep enterprises in the UK would react to market signals and diversify their production balance to increase beef production in order to substitute beef imports that currently come from Ireland.

In addition, on leaving the EU, we will replace the CAP with a new, improved system of rewards and incentives that will reward upland farmers for the delivery of public goods and the powers to deliver this will be introduced in an Agriculture Bill during this session of parliament.