A DAERA proposal to make NI farmers pay for cost of testing fallen stock for BSE was dropped after it was opposed by the industry, the department’s chief vet has said.

In March 2018, a consultation document set out plans for DAERA to no longer cover the cost of BSE-testing dead cattle at rendering sites before incineration.

“One of the proposals was to transfer a charge of £6.50 from the department to the industry, which would inevitably end up with farmers,” DAERA chief vet Robert Huey said at Stormont on Tuesday.

“As you might expect, there were objections to that, and we dropped it. That’s an example of where we thought we might put something in, but once it became controversial, we took it out,” he said.

Huey was speaking at Stormont’s agriculture committee as senior DAERA officials were briefing MLAs on changes that civil servants made to legislation while the NI Assembly was not functioning.

“I would like to reassure the committee that we have been fastidious in ensuring we weren’t exceeding powers in implementing these statutory rules, hence they are quite boring,” Huey told MLAs.

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