Meeting of the Parliament 23 September 2015
If Sarah Boyack will bear with me, I am just coming on to that.
By the end of this year, we will have launched or relaunched between 15 and 20 schemes, each of which needs its own programming. The timespan between Europe agreeing the new common agricultural policy and when we need to make payments is incredibly short. We have an excellent track record of making payments in this country, and we are pulling out all the stops to start to make payments by the end of December, as I have said before. We have registered more than 20,000 customers in the new payments system and have allocated around 400,000 fields to basic payment regions. That gives members an idea of the scale of the challenge that our officials face.
Our challenge under the new European policy is that we are not able to calculate payment rates until we know exactly how many eligible hectares we have in each region. Claims are now being checked and eligible areas are being confirmed so that the value of each farmer’s entitlements can be calculated properly for 2015 and subsequent years. We have the option of delivering part payments to get cash out the door to businesses, and we will seriously consider using that option.
Europe has also given some recognition to the industry’s cash-flow issues and has brought forward a €500 million package: €420 million for direct aid for milk and meat producers, and €80 million for private storage aid and some promotional activities. The UK’s share is just over €36 million, so it is clear that Scotland’s share will be quite modest. However, we must ensure that we get a fair share of the UK’s allocation, as the UK’s track record in such matters is not good. The UK ministers must acknowledge the serious challenges that Scottish farmers face, which I have set out to them. We need the UK to urgently right the wrongs that were done to Scotland when the external convergence uplift was allocated across the whole of the UK, which resulted in Scotland’s farmers losing out on £145 million between now and 2019. That compounds the £1 million per annum that we are already losing through the lost red meat levies, which are now needed back in Scotland more than ever before.
Once we get our share of the EU aid package, Europe requires us to make the payments extremely quickly—in December. Therefore, there will be a focus on pragmatism to make the payments on time.