Month: November 2024

UK farmers are preparing to protest tomorrow November 19th outside Parliament against inheritance tax changes in the new Labour Government budget announced last month. They claim these changes will have a devastating impact on family farm businesses. Perhaps surprisingly, the accelerated phase-out of direct payments also announced in that budget has not been the focus of attention. In this post, I discuss the phasing out of direct payments, leaving the inheritance tax issue to one side.

The UK has been preparing and implementing its post-Brexit agricultural policy since 2018 with the most significant changes taking place in England among the four UK countries. The broad outlines were set in the White Paper Health and Harmony: the future for food, farming and the environment in a Green Brexit published in February 2018 when Michael Gove was the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in the UK Conservative government. This formed the basis for a public consultation that eventually led to the passage of the Agriculture Act 2020 in the UK. … Read the rest

In this post, I look at Member State net budget balances when it comes to CAP expenditure – which Member States would be net gainers or losers from an increase or decrease in the CAP budget, assuming the allocation criteria in play in 2023 were continued. The justification for this exercise is that these net balances likely feed into Member States’ views on the appropriate size of the CAP budget. Net recipients are more likely to favour an expansion in the budget, net payers the opposite. We know that the ‘juste retour’ principle is alive and well when it comes to negotiating the next Multi-annual Financial Framework (MFF).

The basic data are extracted from the DG budget Excel spreadsheet on EU spending and revenue 2000-2023. The assumption is made that we are interested in marginal additions or subtractions to the CAP budget, and that these will be financed by the residual own resource, namely the Gross National Income (GNI) contribution.… Read the rest