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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what estimate she has made of the financial return from her Department's investment in agricultural research and development since 2010.

Defra has not made any assessment of the financial returns on investment in agricultural research since 2010 as this is considered too short a time frame to fully evaluate the impact of research and development. However, research used for the ex-ante evaluation of the £160 million UK Agri-tech strategy suggests strong returns to UK public research of the order of 17-60% per year (internal rate of return) for a period of 25 years¹.

An ex-post evaluation design and baseline study for the Agri-tech strategy is currently being developed by Defra, BIS and DfID in conjunction with evaluation experts SQW. We are also developing a framework for estimating the value for money of new Defra research and development activities.

¹ Thirtle and Holding (2003) “Productivity of UK Agriculture: Causes and Constraints”