Agriculture Minister Edwin Poots overruled advice from senior DAERA officials on four separate occasions last year when allocating funding for various schemes.

DAERA’s annual report states that Minister Poots gave “ministerial direction” four times during the 2021-2022 financial year.

This process is required within government if a minister wants to go ahead with a decision which is against the advice of senior civil servants.

Aid package

In June 2021, Minister Poots used the mechanism to amend an earlier ministerial direction which had been issued during the previous financial year in March 2021.

This surrounded an aid package for farmers in the northwest who were impacted by floods and landslides back in August 2017.

The amended ministerial direction was used to add a payment rate for common land to the scheme and it meant the total cost of the aid package came to £2.5m.

In January 2022, Minister Poots used a ministerial direction to provide £2.4m of support to NI Search and Rescue Services to help purchase equipment.

Two more ministerial directions were issued in March 2022. The first had a cost of £2m and related to a support scheme for pig producers who were impacted by backlogs at pork processing factories.

The other ministerial direction was for a £200,000 support package for agricultural shows in NI.

The DAERA report confirms that all four ministerial directions issued by Minister Poots during 2021-2022 were approved by Finance Minister Conor Murphy.

Complaints

The document also states that DAERA received 68 complaints about the quality of service that members of the public received from department staff during the 2021-2022 financial year.

The total number of complaints for 2021-2022 is the highest number recorded since DAERA was formed in 2016.

Complaints can relate to a range of issues, from delays in responding to correspondence, to the conduct of department staff.

The 68 complaints received last year is up from 42 complaints during 2020/21. The lowest number of complaints received by DAERA was in 2018/19 when 23 issues were recorded.