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 made an assessment of the potential impact of pausing the Sustainable Farming Incentive for new applications for farms in South Suffolk constituency.

We don’t produce constituency level assessments. We publish regular statistics on Farm Business Income broken down in various ways. Farming evidence packs have been recently updated including key statistics and farm performance. These set out an extensive range of data to provide an overview of agriculture in the UK. We will continue to carry out appropriate and timely assessments of our interventions to inform policy development.

On the 11th of March 2025 we published forecasts which suggest that average Farm Business Income has risen in 2024/25 across all farm types with the exception of cereal farms. This follows a fall in income for most farm types in 2023/24, after some exceptional highs in the two preceding years. For all farm types, except for Cereals, expected reductions in Direct Payments have been completely offset by projected increases in other Farm Business Income components in 2024/25.

Across England, 50,000 farm businesses are already in agri-environmental schemes. We will open up initial applications for CS Higher tier and a revised ELM capital grants offer later in the Summer.