The UK government’s agriculture bill will be brought back to Westminster this month, Defra secretary Theresa Villiers has said.

The bill was initially introduced in October 2018, but it fell a year later when Boris Johnson suspended parliament.

“We will be getting on with it as quickly as we possibly can and we are very keen to finish by the spring,” Villiers said at the Oxford Farming Conference on Wednesday.

The Conservative MP maintained that the “fundamentals are very much the same” in the reformed bill.

New element

However, she said that the bill contains a new element which will require the government to periodically review food security in the UK.

The agriculture bill sets out how direct payments to farmers in England will be gradually phased out over a seven-year period, with the first step taking place in 2021.

The government plans to pay English farmers for delivering public goods, which mainly involve environmental measures.

Agricultural policy is a devolved matter in the UK, so it will be up to a future agriculture minister at Stormont to decide what new schemes are introduced for farmers in NI.