Agriculture - national test programme: equality impact assessment

Key Findings

There is limited data or evidence of the impact of the CAP on the protected characteristics. What evidence there is available for the CAP relates to age, sex and race of the current CAP recipients:

Age - The majority of working occupiers (occupier and spouse) are older than 55. The voluntary opportunity to participate in the Programme will be open to recipients of current agricultural support schemes, and the entry requirements are not related to the age of the participant. The Programme will therefore have no impact on this protected characteristic.

Sex - 40% of working occupiers are female, while 60% are male. The voluntary opportunity to participate in the Programme will be open to recipients of current agricultural support schemes, regardless of whether they are male of female. The Programme will therefore have no impact on this protected characteristic.

Race - there is no direct evidence regarding the ethnicity of recipients of CAP support, however, it is known that there are around 8,000 seasonal migrant workers in the Scottish agricultural industry, and their jobs are partially supported by CAP funding. These seasonal workers would not be direct recipients of agricultural support through current rural support schemes (although their employers will likely be recipients of such schemes). The voluntary opportunity to participate in the Programme will be open to recipients of agricultural support through current schemes, regardless of their race. The Programme will therefore have no impact on this protected characteristic.

No significant impacts on any persons with protected characteristics have been identified as a result of the EQIA process for the National Test Programme. There have been a number of evidence gaps identified, however given the short-term and transitionary nature of the Programme it was determined that it would be more appropriate to consider these during the development of the longer term future rural support framework. As a pre-cursor to this, as a result of this EQIA, the potential for requesting some equalities information from participants in Track Two, as part of the Monitoring and Evaluation Framework which is currently in development, is being considered in order to begin the process of addressing these evidence gaps.