Agricultural household survey 2025

Background & Context 3. Scotland, along with the rest of the UK, withdrew from the EU in January 2021 following the agreement of the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement. This post-Brexit era means that the EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) will cease to apply and that Scotland, along with the rest of the UK, is now designing a new support scheme in replacement. 4. Work is currently underway defining a framework for monitoring and evaluating the Agricultural Reform Programme’s (ARP) five strategic policy outcomes and the series of sub-outcomes within them. There are currently several areas where there is either incomplete or unavailable data for effective monitoring purposes, specifically related to skills, knowledge transfer and wellbeing amongst the farming and crofting population. This household survey will play a critical role in bridging these data gaps. 5. One of the four Scottish Government’s Programme for Government 2024-2025 priorities is to eradicate child poverty. In 2022 the Scottish Government commissioned research to improve our understanding of child poverty in rural and island Scotland. Furthermore, a programme of work is currently being undertaken by Dr Sharon Stevelink, UKRI/ESRC Policy Fellow on the trends and patterns of child poverty (specifically relative and absolute poverty, limited resources) as well as various proxies for poverty for rural and island Scotland. However, there is no previous or current research conducted on the prevalence of child poverty broken down by agricultural households. The lack of data available is a barrier to understanding the impact agricultural schemes have on child poverty outcomes in farming and crofting households. In addition, research questions also focus on crucial areas such as knowledge exchange, learning and development, digital access and job satisfaction. Gathering data on these factors will provide a more comprehensive picture of the challenges and opportunities within farming and crofting communities and help inform strategies that enhance and support the priorities of the ARP moving forward. 6. We have recently conducted a data mapping exercise on the data held on farmers’ and crofters’ protected characteristics, socio-economic status, wellbeing and skills needs to assist with the development of indicators to measure progress of the ARP outcomes framework and the 4 main priorities of the Scottish Government. This exercise showed that there is a significant lack of agricultural household data. Most household data is not broken down by sector. Where protected characteristics data, such as sex and age, does exist it is often taken from the June Agricultural Census, which only collects data on the two main occupiers of a holding. Furthermore, some existing socio-economic data collected from the Farm Business Survey, such as on- and off-farm income, only covers a sample of around 400 agricultural holdings and does not include those that have a turnover of less than 20,000 GBP. The shortage of regularly collected data in these areas will make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to adequately and meaningfully measure progress against the aims of the ARP, given that there is not a baseline of data from which to measure change against. 7. We, thus, wish to commission a survey of around 3,000 farming and crofting households (approximately 5% of the population of Scotland’s agricultural businesses and crofts) or an appropriate figure given the scope of this specification. The survey will explore demographics, household composition, economic activity, wellbeing and skills needs and thus, giving us a sense of the impact and effectiveness of the ARP on the diversity, wellbeing and just transition of Scotland’s farmers and crofters.