Professor Gerry Boyle:

The process of determining the advisory fees is that when we are proposing any change in fees, the advisory and education committee of the authority reviews the arguments for fee increases.

They tend to be quite marginal from year to year. The authority committee makes a recommendation to the full authority and if it is adopted by the full authority it has to be approved by the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine. We are going to recover the full cost of our activities because much of our advisory activity is classified as public good activity.

In recent years the Government has put out tenders for the delivery of some large schemes, such as GLAS, which underlines the growth in external income to a significant extent. We competed to provide that service and that generates a large amount of income on top of the charges we impose on farmers.