Direct payments will be issued to NI farmers in full during October 2020, a senior DAERA official has confirmed.With the UK leaving the EU on 31 January, farm support payments in 2020 will come from the British Treasury.

“We will be aiming towards the usual 15 May application deadline, but because we will no longer be paying under an EU budgetary process, we will be able to make full payments from 16 October,” DAERA deputy secretary Norman Fulton told MLAs on Tuesday.

Speaking at Stormont’s agriculture committee, Fulton said that issuing payments in full will cut down on administration for DAERA staff.

In previous years, advanced payments worth 70% of claims were made in October, with the remaining 30% issued in December.

No other changes

However, Fulton said that there will be no other changes to the Basic Payment Scheme in NI this year. Rules surrounding greening, as well as cross compliance and land eligibility, are set to remain the same.

“The 2020 scheme will be a rollover of what we had in 2019, so no changes there,” he confirmed.

If we want to maintain our state aid cover, we have to ensure that there are no material changes

This stems from the UK still being subject to EU state aid rules during the Brexit transition period, which will run until the end of 2020.

“If we want to maintain our state aid cover, we have to ensure that there are no material changes,” Fulton said.

In December, the UK government confirmed that the total fund for NI direct payments in 2020 will be the same as 2019 in sterling terms.

This £293m budget was set by using the last year’s conversion exchange rate of €1 = 89p.

Fulton told MLAs that DAERA officials still have to convert NI farmers’ Basic Payment entitlements from euro to sterling, and the same exchange rate that converted the overall budget will be used.

Legislation to provide a legal basis for direct payments to be issued in 2020 is currently making an accelerated passage through Westminster and Stormont

With the flattening of entitlements now stopped, it effectively means that the payment received by each NI farmer in 2020 will be same in sterling terms as 2019, unless the area claimed by the farmer has changed.

Legislation to provide a legal basis for direct payments to be issued in 2020 is currently making an accelerated passage through Westminster and Stormont ahead of Brexit on 31 January.

For 2021 onwards, the UK government’s agriculture bill, which was re-introduced into parliament last week, provides powers for issuing direct payments, as well as new schemes.

The bill has a section for NI which allows the current system of direct payments to continue and gives DAERA powers to make modifications to it, such as relaxing or removing greening rules.

The agriculture bill will provide us with the ability to continue and take forward some simplifications if that’s what the minister so decides

It also allows DAERA to introduce new support for NI farmers and specifically mentions the likes of coupled support schemes (headage payments) and areas of natural constraint (ANC) payments.

“The agriculture bill will provide us with the ability to continue and take forward some simplifications if that’s what the minister so decides, but any more fundamental reform will probably require legislation going through the [NI] Assembly process. We are at the start of a new era,” Fulton said.

NI funding

Meanwhile, speaking to journalists this week, new Agriculture Minister Edwin Poots said he has made clear to counterparts in London that NI must retain its share of UK farm funding (around 10%) going forward.

“Thus far, there has been no resistance to that,” he said.

When asked if NI will have to follow the lead from England, where a transition to a new policy of “public money for public goods” is set to kick-in from 2021, he said that NI had autonomy, but “we have to be rational at the same time”.

However, he would like to see funding going to active, productive farmers, rather than landowners, and would be open to schemes targeted at the likes of suckler cows and ewes.

Read more

Direct payments guaranteed for 2020

Pressure on Poots to deliver