The family of a Government Minister whose department has covered up details of who receives EU farm subsidies has earned £2 million from the same payouts.

Richard Benyon (left with family) is one of the richest MPs in Parliament. The great-great-grandson of three-times Tory Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, he can trace his ancestry back to William Cecil, the chief political adviser to Elizabeth I.

Tory MP Mr Benyon, the Environment and Fisheries Minister, has received income from a family trust which owns a 20,000-acre estate worth £125 million.

The Englefield Trust, which owns the land on the Berkshire-Hampshire border, was paid more than £2 million through the controversial Common Agricultural Policy farming grants from 1999 to 2009.

In 2009 alone the family farms were paid nearly £200,000, placing them in the top one per cent of beneficiaries of the EU scheme.

Farming Minister Jim Paice has also received several thousands of pounds in EU subsidies for his farm in Cambridgeshire over the same ten-year period.

Mr Benyon was appointed a Minister at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) last May. Some time after November the department decided to block all information about how much farmers had earned from subsidies. More than 100,000 British farmers were paid the majority of the £3 billion available in EU farming subsidies for last year.

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