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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps her Department is taking to reduce the burden of regulation on farmers.

The Government (Defra, the Department for Transport, Food Standards Agency and the Home Office) accepted 137 of more than 200 recommendations made by the Farming Regulation Task Force in 2011.

The Farming Regulation Task Force Implementation Group published a final assessment of our delivery in April 2014 which concluded that we had completed or made progress against the vast majority of the accepted recommendations. The remaining 27 recommendations are currently being reviewed as part of the ‘Cutting Red Tape: Review of the Information Managements in the Agricultural Sector’. A report on the findings of this review will be published in due course.

Leaving the EU creates many opportunities to improve regulation and the way regulation is implemented. The government is currently working on future policy and will consult industry and rural communities.