European Commissioner for Agriculture and Rural Development Phil Hogan may not have endeared himself to the NI dairy industry in 2015, but at least he is delivering on promises to simplify an overly complicated CAP.

The measures he announced this week include a system of preliminary checks by paying agencies such as DARD, allowing them to identify problems with applications up to 35 days after the final date of submission of Single Application Forms.

Farmers will be allowed to make corrections without penalty. This should help do away with what are often simple errors, such as two people claiming on the one field, mistakes which in the past have cost farmers a lot of money.

The second element of the new measures is to reduce the level of penalty when a claimant over-declares the amount of eligible land on a form.

At present, there is no penalty where the error is less than 3% or 2ha (and this remains the case in 2016), but an error above this has previously resulted in a reduction on the claim of twice the area over-declared. Where the difference is over 20%, the rule has been to make no payment at all.

Under the Hogan proposals, the penalties will be simplified to 1.5 times the area over-declared. So a farmer who claims 110ha, but is subsequently found to have only 100ha of eligible land, will receive a payment based on 85ha, and not the 80ha as under the previous regime.

The final change is a yellow card system for first-time offenders. Where the over-declaration is minor (less than 10%), the level of penalty is halved.

Coming later in 2016 is a promise from Hogan to look at the overly bureaucratic rules around greening.

Of course, by then these changes might all be irrelevant if the latest polls are right, and the UK opts out of Europe.