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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, with reference to her Department's report entitled Rural Economic Bulletin, updated on 10 December 2025, what assessment she has made of recent rural employment trends in Buckinghamshire.

The Official Statistics Rural-Urban Classification classifies Buckinghamshire as an intermediate urban authority, having between 20% and 35% of its population within rural areas. The Department has employment figures for Buckinghamshire as a whole.

Between 2020 and 2022 the proportion of the working-age population in Buckinghamshire who were employed rose from 77.7% to 81.6% before falling back to 80.5% in 2024. Data for Buckinghamshire for the 5 most recent years is published within Defra’s Rural Economic Bulletin Supplementary Data Tables. Worksheet AD contains the percentage of the working-age population who were employed for every local authority in England across the period 2006 to 2024.