Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, whether he has conducted an impact assessment of the decision to accelerate reduction of direct payments to farming businesses.

The Government has committed to support farmers through a farming budget of £5 billion over two years, including £2.4 billion in 2025/26. Accelerating the phase out of Direct Payments will allow us to focus more of this funding on Environmental Land Management schemes, which will boost nature and sustainable food production.

We publish regular statistics on farm income in England, including data earlier this year looking at how farm business income has changed since the start of the agricultural transition (Monitoring the agricultural transition period in England, 2022/23 - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)). This release will be updated in February 2025 with the 2024/24 data. On 14 November 2024, we published our Farm Business Income statistics (Farm business income - GOV.UK), which looked at how farm business income has changed in 2023/24, including the contribution of Direct Payments and agri-environment payments to farm incomes, including analysis by farm type.

Data relating to farm businesses are regularly published. Agriculture in the UK 2023 was published in June 2024. Farming evidence packs have been recently updated including key statistics and farm performance (Farming statistics evidence packs - GOV.UK). These set out an extensive range of data to provide an overview of agriculture in the UK, and the contribution of farm payments to farm incomes, including analysis by sector, location in England and type of land tenure.

We will continue to carry out appropriate and timely assessments of our interventions to inform policy development.