The government’s plans for a post-Brexit scheme to support British farming are based on little more than “blind optimism” and risk increasing the UK’s reliance on food imports, a parliamentary inquiry has warned.
The EU’s scheme of subsidies – known as the common agricultural policy (CAP) and worth £3bn-a-year to UK farmers – was one of the long-running complaints of Eurosceptics, who saw the ability of Britain to draw up its own scheme of payments as one of the major benefits of Brexit. Ministers had said the new scheme would be used to increase the environmental benefits of agriculture.
However, MPs on the powerful cross-party public accounts committee (PAC) found there remained a crippling lack of detail around the environmental land management schemes (ELMs) designed to replace EU payments. They said that by the government’s own admission, “its confidence in the scheme looks like blind optimism”. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) had given no explanation of how the new scheme’s impact on English farmers would be mitigated, warning that some would see their income from direct payments reduce by more than half by 2024-25.
Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, the Tory deputy chair of PAC and a long-term Brexit supporter, said there were still “no clear plans” to replace CAP, more than five years after the EU referendum. He warned some small farms on “wafer-thin margins” could go out of business. “Farmers, especially the next generation who we will depend on to achieve our combined food production and environmental goals, have been left in the dark. It is simply wrong that Defra’s own failures of business planning should undermine the certainty crucial to a critical national sector,” he said.
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