Minister and union play down £35m EU penalty

Published on Thursday 9 February 2012 00:45

Both the Scottish Government and NFU Scotland yesterday played down a £35 million penalty imposed on the government by the European Commission following a 2009 audit of the single farm payment scheme.

The fine has been imposed following a large number of discrepancies found by the auditors on the amount and nature of the area of land included in the subsidy claims. Specifically the auditors were concerned with claims for non-productive land such as farm roads, areas under buildings and areas of bracken or scree.

Rural affairs secretary Richard Lochhead said the fine was much less than that imposed on other member states.

And the union was quick to stress that the penalty – or, in European jargon, a disallowance – would not affect individual farmers’ subsidy payments.

Union president Nigel Miller admitted the fine was not good news “but a key point for farmers to keep in mind is that this announcement will have no impact on their payments and is pitched at a national level”.

That point was confirmed by Lochhead, who said provision had already been made to cover the cost of the disallowance in the Scottish Government budget and there would be no impact on farmers or existing budgets.

Lochhead claimed that, thanks to government efforts, the penalty had been kept as low as possible. “At less than 2 per cent of the total spend for the three years concerned, the disallowance level is well below the EC’s often-used flat rate of 5 per cent ‘financial correction’,” he said.

In his reference to Scotland’s favourable outcome compared to other countries, he pointed out the £35m was nowhere near the level of fines imposed on Sweden, which recently faced a disallowance of £65m, or Denmark, which faced a penalty of £105m.

Closer to home, England was disallowed around £175m and in Northern Ireland the figure was £80m. In total ,24 out of the 27 EU member states have received a disallowance relating to their area aid payments between 2005 and 2011.

Looking forward, both the government and the union believed that now farmers and inspectors were more aware of the standards, there would be no major problems in the future

Comments

There are 1 comments to this article

Order by:

• Newest first
• |
• Oldest first

Page 1 of 1

• 1
• Show all

1

Daye Tucker

Thursday, February 9, 2012 at 12:02 PM

Well done Scottish Government for mitigating these fines. The efforts they made to help farmers reassess their eligible acres, and the efforts made by farmers to comply, although a nuisance at the time, appears to have paid off when compared to the fines imposed on other countries.

• Report Unsuitable

Order by:

• Newest first
• |
• Oldest first

Page 1 of 1

• 1
• Show all

Logged in as:

Comment here. Start typing your comment here:

Post comment

Please adhere to our Community guidelines

Your view

Please sign in to be able to comment on this story.