Within hours of the latest steps towards CAP reform being agreed the team from Andersons Farm Business Consultants were on their feet at an Edinburgh seminar outlining how the measures might be implemented.
The timing might have been coincidental, but in fact Tuesday night’s decisions in Brussels made little impact on what they had to say.
One thing became clear quickly Andersons’ clients in England will have a much easier transition to the new CAP than their Scottish clients will.
Business research partner Richard King explained that because English farmers had already had to endure the rocky road towards regional payments over the last eight years it would simply be a case of their entitlements to support payments being rolled over at the end of next year.
Anyone who had 100 hectares of Single Farm Payment (SFP) entitlement on December 31 2014 would wake up the next morning with 100 hectares of entitlements to the new Basic Payment Scheme.
The value of the entitlements could well be different, but at least there was simplicity.
Mr King was “95% sure” Defra would take this easy option.
Scotland would inevitably have a more convoluted changeover because its journey from historically based payments to area-based systems was only about to start.
“This will involve a completely new allocation of entitlements, and all eligible land will need to be taken into consideration rather than that which had received support since 2005,” he said.
“Our understanding is that the new entitlements will be based on the land occupied by a farm business in 2015 rather than 2014 as previously thought.”
Mr King had at earlier events spoken about what he called the “golden ticket” to claim under the new Basic Payment Scheme. It had previously been thought that an SFP claim of any size would have to have been made in 2011 to make a business eligible for the new scheme.
Now it looks more likely that 2013 will be the base year.
“This means on the face of it that anyone who has not made a claim in 2013 will not be able to establish a claim in 2015.
“I do think, however, there will be enough exceptions to make sure very few people lose out.
“For example, there will be rules to cope with situations where a farm has been sold, merged or divided after 2013. It should also be possible for the ‘golden ticket’ to be sold or transferred,” Mr King added.
A national reserve of entitlements would be available to help out new entrants or others unfairly left out of the scheme.
The biggest chunk of the entitlements would be made available to new entrants in the first year, but the intention was that a replenished reserve would be available in future years.
Some of the replenishment could come from “confiscation” from farmers who had more entitlements than they had land available to trigger them.
Scotland would need to achieve the changeover to full area payments within five years compared to the eight years which had been available in England between 2005 and 2013.
Noting that the Scottish Government had yet to give a firm indication as to how it would implement area or regional payments, Mr King thought it highly likely that it would allocate payment on historic land use using three categories. Arable and temporary grass would be considered as one; permanent pasture would be another; and the third would be rough grazing.
He said: “I think it very possible that the allocation will be done on a field-by-field basis within an individual farm. So a farm could easily have areas of all three land types on it and receive three different levels of payment. “To establish the historic use the Government may have to look back five years. One problem, however, would be that new land on which payments had never been claimed would have no history to refer to.”
Using this method rather than a simple geographic regionalisation would be fairer but it would still avoid a considerable redistribution of funds.
Mr King reckoned it likely that to help level that effect payments on rough grazing would be, as suggested by the Pack Inquiry, low. Possibly they would be at no more than 30 euros per hectare.
The middle band consisting of permanent pasture would receive a considerably higher payment to encourage beef, sheep and dairy production, with the arable and temporary grass sector receiving a lower payment on the grounds that this better land provided more cropping options.
This has been referred to as the “Olympic podium” system because the highest step is in the middle.
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