The  Agricultural Tenancies Act 1995 introduced Farm Business Tenancies. It did so in an attempt to make more land available to rent and to offer a means of formalising a wide range of informal tenurial arrangements. 

In this paper, presented as the key-note address at ROOTS 2008, Michael Winter and Allan Butler of the University of Exeter undertook a postal survey of famers across England and Wales and compared this with an earlier study published in 1990. There has been no fundamental shift from owner occupation towards conventional tenancies.

The proportion of land let under full agricultural tenancies has dropped sharply, to be replaced by FBTs, but the overall proportion of land let conventionally appears to have actually declined slightly. 

In 1990 owner occupation accounted for 58.7% of the land area – in 2007 it was 57.7%. The inexorable post-1918 increase in owner occupation has been halted but it has hardly yet been put into reverse. There have been modest increases in both formal and informal unconventional tenures, particularly contract farming.

This suggests that although FBTs have undoubtedly filled a gap in the market they cannot cope with the contractual flexibility required in some situations.   The land use and management implications for the continuing wide range of occupancy arrangements are little understood.