Scotland's Less Favoured Areas (LFA) cover the majority of the country's agricultural land (86%) and are essential to sustaining rural communities, food production, and environmental stewardship. Farming in these areas faces significant natural constraints, including challenging terrain, harsh weather, and poorer soils, making production more costly and less profitable than in lowland regions.

For policymakers, understanding the importance of LFA is critical to ensuring that agricultural, environmental, and rural development policies reflect the unique challenges of Scotland's upland and remote farming communities and safeguard their long-term economic and environmental contribution.

The LFA Committee have been working hard to communicate the value of Scotlands LFAs, and the benefits they deliver. 

After the Scottish Parliament election back in May, there were 65 new MSPs sworn in. It is a key priority for us to effectively communicate to all MSPs what Less Favoured Areas deliver, and why support is vital to enable that delivery. We will continue to advocate for the delivery of targeted direct support to active upland livestock farmers and crofters, to ensure these businesses remain viable, and profitable. 

At every opportunity we also underline the importance of coupled support, to not only drive productivity and efficiency, but to ensure support is delivered to businesses that are actively farming and crofting. Although LFAs deliver more than high-quality food production, it remains an important outcome. 

In order to communicate this effectively, we have written a comprehensive briefing for MSPs, MPs and political stakeholders to underline the importance of Scotlands LFAs, and all that they deliver. This will enable the Union and our members to use this as a tool to make an unequivocal case for the continuation of support for Less Favoured Areas. 

The briefing is complemented with a more detailed policy paper, expanding on the wider benefits, while demonstrating the economic contribution of LFA businesses. For more detailed information on LFA policy, please see the paper here. 

We continue to engage with Scottish Government on LFA support and how this translates into policy as we move into a new future support framework. We welcome Scottish Governments clear and unequivocal statement that LFASS will be retained until a replacement scheme is ready, which confirms that Scottish Government has chosen to maintain the current scheme as a pragmatic measure during the development of future support. This provides an important degree of stability and certainty for our members that must not be underestimated or undervalued. This is confirmed in the Rural Support Plan, which was published in March, which underlines Scottish Governments intent to maintain direct support (including LFASS) largely intact until 2030. This commitment to continuity represents a positive and important outcome from our continuous engagement on the LFA support. 

We have also highlighted there is an immediate and actionable issue that must be addressed: the consistent underspend within the LFASS budget. In a sector where many active farmers and crofters feel under-supported, leaving allocated funds unused represents a missed opportunity. NFUS has therefore called for a more targeted and strategic use of this underspend to better reflect current farming realities.

We wrote to Minister Fairlie MSP regarding our ask on utilisation of the LFASS underspend to “level up” active businesses, with support targeted at active farmers and crofters with significantly increased stocking levels and new entrants disadvantaged by historic baselines, through the introduction of a case-by-case review or appeals mechanism to address clear anomalies.

We were disappointed our ask wasn’t seen by Scottish Government as a workable solution. Again, while we welcome the strong commitment to retain LFASS until 2030, we will continue to advocate for our suggested approach which provides a pragmatic, achievable solution to ensure funding reaches those delivering real agricultural activity which would provide a fairer distribution of funding without the need for full-scale reform of the scheme. 

Advocating for our upland farming and crofting members remains a priority, and we will continue to lobby policymakers for effective, targeted support. Please make use of the LFA – Delivering for Scotland documents to ensure our voice is heard across the political landscape. If you have any questions, please get in touch with me.