Slightly over one third of EU funds allocated to the NI Rural Development Programme (RDP) 2014-2020 have been spent so far, a DAERA spokesperson confirmed this week.

At the end of 2017, €83m had been drawn down from total available EU funds of €228m.

This equates to over 36% of NI’s allocation from the EU. This is ahead of the average RDP expenditure across EU member states, which currently sits at 26%.

However, when co-financing from national funds are factored in, RDP expenditure to date amounts to £124m, which is one third of the core fund of £373m. But if you add in the £250m potentially coming from Stormont, mainly to fund capital grants under the Farm Business Improvement Scheme (FBIS), the pot is £623m. Therefore, total spending, to date, is less than 20% of this £623m allocation. So far, £40m has come from the Stormont Executive to fund FBIS.

“All funding under the RDP has been allocated to schemes but expenditure is subject to business case approval and availability of national funds,” a DAERA spokesperson told the Irish Farmers Journal.

Among the most significant delays across all RDP schemes has been with the rollout of the Tier 2 capital grant element of FBIS for building projects costing over £30,000. So far, DAERA have issued 48 letters of offer to successful applicants equating to £4.82m of grant funding.

With £10m of funding available in the first tranche of Tier 2, it is expected that around 100 of the 189 applicants to the first tranche of the scheme will receive grant funding. A second tranche of Tier 2 potentially has £15m available.

In Tier 1 of the scheme, two tranches worth £7.5m each time have been opened for applications.

Rollout

It remains unclear how the rest of the FBIS will be rolled out and how much of the £200m that was originally planned for the scheme will be passed onto NI farmers.

“Information gathered from these first two tranches of the scheme will inform a stocktake review and considerations about further roll out of the scheme,” the DAERA spokesperson said.

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