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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, whether his Department has removed the requirement to be an active farmer to claim funding from the Basic Payment Scheme.

You must be a farmer to claim under the Basic Payment Scheme (BPS) and must have land ‘at your disposal’. This means, for example, that where land is let under a Farm Business Tenancy, it is the tenant and not the landlord who can use that land to claim BPS.

Previously the BPS rules included an active farmer test. We removed this in 2018 because it was ineffective and created unnecessary confusion for farmers.