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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what assessment she has made of the potential impact of agricultural robotics on the future agricultural workforce.

We are committed to increasing long-term labour resilience and robotic and autonomous applications could help with this. A 2025 Checkpoint evaluation of the Farming Innovation Programme, which funds several R&D projects developing robotics for the farming sector, found emerging evidence that supported technologies could help address labour shortages and improve productivity, efficiency and environmental performance. However, most automation projects are still in R&D or trial testing and it is too early to assess their wider impact.