Mr. Noel Meehan:

A big part of what we do relates to the implementation measures.

If we do not have implementation measures, we will not see an improvement in water quality. We had to formulate a way of monitoring the level of implementation and it is a five-point process. It indicates if a measure has not started or is not proceeding, for example, and this might be where a farmer may have agreed to a measure initially but when we returned has decided not to do it for various reasons. I will explain that in a moment. A third point is where a measure has commenced, such as if a water course has been fenced off. The fourth point is where a water course's fencing is completed and the other option is where the process is ongoing. For the "ongoing" option, it is where we speak of practice change. It is where a farmer may have been putting slurry on a field on 15 January but we have indicated it brings too high a risk and we would like the farmer to put it out later in the season, when it would be less risky. Such practice change would be always ongoing, forever and a day, if the farmer wants that. That is the way we have done that.

The 37% figure refers to where farmers have not started, where farmers have just not gotten to start the measure. It could be because of planning permission issues or because they are waiting for funding from some source. Part of the reason both Departments have committed funding to support measures is that when we ask farmers to do measures and they tell us they cannot for reasons X, Y and Z, we feed that back to the Departments dealing with agriculture and housing and local government. Barriers to implementation have been mentioned and we have reported feedback from farmers about such barriers. The barrier that is repeatedly the most reported is around the fencing of water courses from livestock access. There are complex reasons for farmers not doing this, relating to cost, alternative drinking water supplies, the ground being rented or a farmer's age and a lack of successor, for example. It is a very complex matter but we report it to the funding Departments. It is one of the reasons the fund I spoke of a while ago has been made available. It is about trying to get through those barriers and improving the level of implementation. I absolutely agree that this is a key action and we are working very hard with farmers to get that level of implementation as high as possible.