Major revamp for REPS

By Paul Mooney

Pat Quinn, and his nephew Mark, feed ewes ready to lamb at the foothills of the Dublin mountains in Saggart.

Major changes for the REPS 4 scheme concerning payment and anniversary dates were announced yesterday by Minister for Agriculture Mary Coughlan. The announcement comes after weeks of negotiations between her officials and the EU Commission.

Payments for all REPS 4 participants will be made in the autumn in two separate instalments: 75% when all the administrative checks (including the Single Payment checks) are finalised, and the remaining 25% when the last of the REPS on-farm inspections has taken place. This is a major change from the up front payments that have applied in REPS 1, 2 and 3 and from the arrangements initially announced for the new scheme.

REPS 4 farm plans will run for the calendar year and all REPS 4 participants will have an anniversary date of 1 January. Existing REPS farmers joining the new scheme will have to adjust their anniversary date accordingly. In practice this means that REPS4 plans for such farmers will run to five years plus a few months.

All farmers joining REPS 4 will have to do so by the Single Farm Payment Scheme deadline of 15 May if they want to be admitted to the scheme and be paid in that calendar year.

Thus new entrants wanting to join REPS now must submit their applications to the new scheme and their farm plans by 15 May next if they are to receive payment this year.

However, a whole series of transitional arrangements will apply to REPS 2 and 3 farmers who want to join REPS 4 in 2008. These will allow the 3,000 farmers whose existing five year plans finish this year join the new scheme and receive their first payment later this year.

Crucially, Minister Coughlan announced that existing payment arrangements for the 54,000 farmers still in REPS 2 and 3 would continue as they are.