Select Committee on Agriculture Minutes of Evidence


Examination of witnesses (Questions 115 - 119)

TUESDAY 14 JULY 1998

MR REG HAYDON AND MR GEORGE DUNN

Chairman

  115. Mr Haydon, Mr Dunn, welcome to this evidence session of the Agriculture Committee inquiry into the rural development aspects of the Common Agricultural Policy reform. It will be very helpful, although I know many of the Committee know you personally, if you could just formally introduce yourselves for the record, Mr Haydon.

  (Mr Haydon) Thank you, Mr Chairman. First of all, thank you very much for inviting us, the TFA, to come before your Committee, which we look forward to. I am Reg Haydon. I am the National Chairman of the Tenant Farmers Association. I am also a tenant farmer running two businesses, one in the lowlands in England near Arundel, a tenant farm covering 500 areas of mixed arable/dairy farm. I also run a hill farm in the Brecon Beacons National Park which is also tenanted, so I have a wide spread of enterprises. On my right I have George Dunn, who is our Chief Executive, and we will endeavour to answer your questions.

  116. Thank you very much. After the kind and gracious things you said about me last week at the Royal Show, I shall instruct the Committee to be very generous to you. Mr Haydon, thank you for your written evidence, which the Committee appreciates. Perhaps we could start with some very factual nitty-gritty stuff, just to get the Committee going. To start with, some very basic facts about the tenant farm sector. How many tenant farms do you estimate there are in the United Kingdom?
  (Mr Haydon) It is very difficult to say. An estimate, a figure from the Ministry is around 16,000 in England. There are approximately 1,900 in Wales, where owner/occupancy is more to the fore, especially small family farms. In Scotland, we think there are about 5,500. These figures need to be taken with caution because there are many owner/occupiers who rent a proportion of land as well and who keep quiet about it. There are also many other systems operating within the system, partnerships within families, where one of the members of the family may own the farm and rent it to other members of the family and in a partnership, for taxation and other reasons. There are quite a lot of those and it is very difficult to define what they are. That would give you some rough idea.

  117. Those figures of 23,000 tenant farmers, you would recognise as tenant farmers in the true sense of the word, largely?
  (Mr Haydon) Yes, I would think it is about that.

  118. Have you any idea what the average farm size would be of those holdings?
  (Mr Haydon) It is very difficult to say. George?
  (Mr Dunn) The Ministry figure would indicate that the average farm is somewhere round about the same as owner/occupation, around 120 or 150 hectares.

  119. The same sort of average size?
  (Mr Dunn) Yes.


 
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