Mr. Brian Lucas:

As the Minister of State said in his opening statement, the three Departments have been looking at a suite of measures for the situation in the industry. I know it was said the previous day and my understanding is the paper and the suite of measures have not yet been signed off by party leaders. Obviously then, I am limited in the kind of detail I can go into, but the type of thing in the paper would include looking at whether stocks of peat are available which may not have been looked at up to now and could be made suitable for use by the industry; the potential to make equipment, mixing plants and expertise available to assist the industry, if that would be helpful; and using the expertise in various organisations, in terms of their supply chains, to see if peat could be sourced.

The Department has been asked by the chair of the working group to see if it would be possible to make funding available to a student to undertake research on the hydrothermal carbonisation of green waste and spent mushroom compost to produce a substrate which could be used as peat replacement in growing media. The Department is looking at that. The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine issued a research call and one of the areas within that is research on peat growing media for horticulture production. My understanding is this call is to be approved and successful applicants will be made known in November next about the research expected to start early next year.