Royal family criticised for taking farm payouts

Some of the wealthiest landowners in the UK are pocketing millions of pounds in EU subsidies.

An investigation by the BBC’s Panorama programme has revealed that under the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) in 2010, a total of 47 payments of over £1 million were made.

CAP payouts are rewarded for the amount of agricultural land a person owns, meaning often the richest and largest landowners receive the biggest payments.

The programme collected anonymised figures for 2010 for all four UK administrations: the Scottish Government Rural Payments and Inspections Directorate, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra); Northern Ireland’s Department of Agriculture and Rural Development and the Welsh Government.

The Panorama programme claims members of the Royal family also benefited. According to Panorama the Queen has received around £7 million in farming subsidies over past decade. Meanwhile the Duke of Westminster has received around £6m in that time.

A Buckingham Palace spokesman said: “Like others with agricultural interests, we are in receipt of the Single Farm Payment.”

But National Farmers Union president Peter Kendall defended the system, saying: “We rightly moved from a system that developed grain mountains and milk lakes to one [based] on land.

Subsidy campaigner Jack Thurston said: “These are very wealthy people and if we’re in the business of handing out public money to farmers because they’re poor, these are not the kind of people that we’d be handing that money to.”