Asked by: Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask His Majesty's Government what is the number of full time equivalent personnel employed by DEFRA to administer farming and horticultural grants and subsidies in England on the latest date for which figures are available.
Answered by Lord Douglas-Miller - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs)
The information requested is not held centrally and to obtain it would incur disproportionate costs.
Defra’s Grants Hub data does not hold a ‘Farming & Horticulture’ flag so it would not be possible to quickly pull together a list of schemes in scope of this question.
Manually reviewing the schemes and deciding if they fit or not, without a standard definition of what counts as ‘Farming & Horticulture’, would require a degree of personal judgement and therefore yield some inaccuracy. It would then be necessary to validate the list with teams to ensure they are ‘Farming & Horticulture’ grants.
From experience of similar requests, this would push the cost to disproportionate (ie greater than the HMT-set limit of £850 for a PQ answer).