Mr. Paul Dillon:

There can be but it is entirely up to the committee. To come back to the Chairman's question, we will be setting up the committee straight away. The Minister will make an announcement about that. We will be writing to the farmers who are being adversely affected so they will be told about their right of appeal. They will simply have to write back and say they want to appeal. That is all they have to do at the outset.

We can then tell them the reason they have been dropped from the scheme or have not got in, for instance which of the biophysical criteria or fine tuning they have failed and so on. That would allow them to focus their appeal. There is no point in making it any longer, which is why there is a two-step process. That will not take very long.

On the timeline, the 2019 scheme will open in February in tandem with the basic payment scheme, BPS, for 2019. The closing date is 15 May. Anyone who is in doubt should apply anyway by ticking the box on the BPS form, as they would have done previously. It is critical that we have those appeals in time for payments in autumn 2019. That is the window for all that work to be done and dusted.