Jill Rutter

And that's basically been the core guiding principle of the England scheme.

A lot of farmers would say, actually, we haven't got the same degree of assurance we used to have through the income support.

And farming has been through very volatile periods since 2020.

Some very good for farming.

Big commodity price rises in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Other areas where we're seeing now

Massive squeeze on farm costs because of the rise in fertiliser prices as a consequence of the war in Iran.

The first thing is, of course, the trade deal with the EU.

And just as Joel was saying about fishing, we've seen a big fall off in a lot of agri-food exports to the EU as a consequence now of those new barriers, not customs barriers, but the need to comply with paperwork much, much harder.

And we haven't made it comparably difficult for European farmers to bring their goods into Great Britain.

So that's the first problem there.

The second one is that the UK was very keen to land new free trade agreements and landed them quite early with Australia and New Zealand.

And our livestock farmers in particular said,

think that that has left them potentially very exposed because the EU, when we landed those deals, hadn't landed deals with those countries, partly because they couldn't reach agreement on reducing the level of protection in the European market.

So the constraints facing Australian and New Zealand livestock, beef and sheep farmers.

The UK has agreed to phase out quotas on exports from Australia and New Zealand over 15 years.

The UK government could say, well, that will be good for consumers, cheaper beef and lamb potentially.

They don't make too much of that.

They actually say most of those imports will substitute for ones that come from Europe at the moment.

But our farmers feel very exposed and very let down.