Mr. Paud Evans:

We are discussing land eligibility and the booklet. We must realise that our purpose is to make payments to farmers. For this reason, we must ensure the system we have put in place is controllable and, more important, is controllable in an efficient and quick way that enables us to make payments in the autumn.

Both Deputies referred to the idea of specifying a height for heather. While this is a valid point, if we were to go down the route of setting heights and trying to determine heights on the ground, farmers would not be paid this year and may not even be paid next year. We must bear in mind that the Department wants to make valid payments to farmers as quickly as we can.

On the issue of new reference areas, we have more than 1 million parcels on our land parcel identification system, LPIS. While some of these cover ten fields, more contain only one field or in any case fewer than five fields. We cannot make an ongoing assessment of every parcel as to do so would require an inspection rate of 100%. With such an inspection rate, no issues would arise about anything. We made clear when issuing maps in 2010, 2011 and 2012 that it was a matter for farmers to identify ineligible areas and features, mark them on their maps and submit the maps to the Department.