The College of Agriculture, Food and Rural Enterprise (CAFRE) is the top recipient of farm direct payments in NI, with a total of over £225,000.

The list of CAP payments to individual farmers and farm businesses across the UK was published by Defra at the end of May. It shows all monies paid out for the period 16 October 2018 to 15 October 2019, so effectively is the 2018 payment made to farmers.

The data published by Defra includes money going out under the Rural Development Programme (RDP), which can distort the overall totals. Branches within DAERA, various district councils, and Dungannon-based Countryside Services, administer RDP programmes and can pull in significant monies of up to £1m and more in a year. There are also various businesses that have received RDP grants to upgrade facilities, as well as farmers in receipt of environmental farming scheme payments.

In our analysis, these RDP payments are excluded. Instead we have simply focused on direct payments (Basic Payment Scheme and greening). We have also removed all direct payments below £200 – in NI the minimum claim size is 3ha, which should equate to a payment of at least £530.

Across NI, there were 24,122 claims paid out, at an average of £12,006 per farm, which is virtually unchanged from the £12,045 from the previous year.

CAFRE received the most, with direct payments of £225,468, having replaced Fermanagh farmer Gordon Burleigh at the top of the list. He is second, with a payment of £225,127, followed by C & C Phillips on £216,474, Blakiston Houston Estate Co. on £214,923 and A & A Devine on £200,003. Of these top five, all were placed within the top six payments in the previous year.

Three of the top five receive a young farmer top-up (which is included in our analysis), although the main benefit of that scheme was that it allowed successful applicants to move straight to the NI average payment (around €330/ha) in the first year. For anyone with a large track of hill land, and starting out with low value entitlements, it significantly boosted payments.

ANC

For the 2017-2018 year it was notable that 19 of the top 20 CAP payments made to farmers included Area of Natural Constraint (ANC) money, suggesting that at least some, or perhaps all, of the land used to make a claim was in the severely disadvantaged area (SDA). In 2017-2018 ANC payments to these top 20 claimants averaged over £14,000.

But the ANC scheme ended in NI, with the last payment made in March 2018, so it is not included in the 2018-2019 figures. As a result, the total CAP payments received in many of these businesses are down significantly from the previous year. In the case of CAFRE, it received £271,395 in 2017-2018, which included the largest ANC payment of any claimant of over £50,000.

In some cases, a proportion of the lost ANC monies have been partly replaced by payments from agri-environment schemes, and in particular, the higher level environmental farming scheme (EFS). However, EFS comes with many conditions, and is not an income support payment.

Scottish get largest direct payments per farm

Farming in Scotland and England is done on a completely different scale to NI, and that is reflected in our analysis of direct payments per farm business.

Scottish farmers receive the highest direct payments, with 18,058 claimants receiving an average of £26,808, which is more than double the NI average.

In addition, farmers also get less favoured area (LFA) support, with over £85m paid out in 2018-2019 across 10,681 farms, which works out an average of £8,011 per farm.

However, to compare across regions, if we calculate this LFA money against every claimant in Scotland, it works out at £4,739. This takes the total average payments per farm to over £30,000.

In future years, there is also £160m of CAP convergence money coming to Scottish farmers. This Boris Johnson pre-election promise, which has since been confirmed by the UK government, is coming because of low direct payments per ha in Scotland.

That low rate per ha left the UK as a whole below the EU average, and due an additional £190m in the last CAP period from 2014 to 2020. The Scottish consistently argued that all this money should have come to them.

Top claimants

With no limit on payments in Britain (unlike in NI, where BPS is capped at €150,000), there are some large individual businesses taking in massive payments per farm.

The top recipient in Scotland is the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), with direct payments of £2.9m. In England, that figure is only beaten by Beeswax Dyson Farming Ltd, owned by inventor James Dyson, and with a payment of £2.96m. In second is the National Trust with direct payments of £2.7m.

In Wales, the top claimant is Cnewr estate Ltd, at £427,067. The average across all 15,447 claimants in Wales comes to £15,262.

In England, there are 84,083 claimants, receiving an average of £21,938 per farm.

In total, 10.6% of these claimants in England had payments over £50,000, compared to 15.8% in Scotland, 3.2% in Wales and just 2.7% in NI (see Table 1).

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