Dáil debates

Thursday, 4 May 2017

Ceisteanna - Questions - Priority Questions

GLAS Payments

2:35 pm

Photo of Charlie McConalogueCharlie McConalogue (Donegal, Fianna Fail)
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3. To ask the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine the number of persons who have not received 85% of their total 2016 payment under the GLAS and AEOS schemes; the reason for the delay; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [21351/17]

Photo of Charlie McConalogueCharlie McConalogue (Donegal, Fianna Fail)
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I ask the Minister to outline the total number of GLAS and AEOS scheme applicants who have not yet received their 85% payment for 2016 as promised by the Minister and Department, and if he will update the House on the current situation.

Photo of Michael CreedMichael Creed (Cork North West, Fine Gael)
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GLAS and AEOS provide valuable support to farmers to deliver environmental benefits and public goods which will enhance Ireland's sustainability credentials into the future. They provide support to Irish farmers aimed at enhancing biodiversity, water quality and the mitigation of the future impacts of climate change, while allowing Irish farmers to improve their agricultural practices.

The GLAS scheme is the latest agri-environment scheme available to farmers. It forms part of Ireland’s rural development plan 2014-2020. To date, in excess of 50,000 farmers have had applications approved into the scheme under three different tranches over a 14-month period. The approval of these farmers into the scheme has been achieved a year ahead of the original target set when the scheme was launched.

The first full year of payments to participants in the first two tranches of the scheme is 2016. To date, over 91% of these participants have received their 2016 GLAS advance payment which represents 85% of the total 2016 payment due. There are some 3,000 applicants who have not yet received this payment as their applications have not passed all the regulatory cross-checks of Department databases and validation checks required to support these EU co-funded payments.

As the Deputy is aware, this is a complex scheme with over 30 different actions available which allows farmers a choice of environmental actions to suit their farms. However, with this flexibility of choice for farmers comes increased complexity in administrating the scheme. My Department has committed significant resources in developing systems, including IT systems, to support this level of complexity, with the system required to support multiple changes in land parcel details and multiple combinations of actions across holdings and parcels.

Outstanding 2016 payments under GLAS 1 and 2 have been delayed due to a variety of issues, including the declaration of incompatible parcel usage on the basic payment scheme, BPS, application for a selected GLAS action, changes in parcel boundaries in respect of parcels selected for GLAS actions, an applicant no longer claiming a parcel on his or her 2016 BPS and incomplete documentation, such as an incorrect or incomplete low-emission slurry declaration form or interim commonage management plan.

All cases which have passed all the required checks have been paid and cases continue to be paid as they are cleared. In addition, I want reassure the Deputy that my Department is continuing to review outstanding applications on a case-by-case basis, including contacting farmers directly by telephone, e-mail or letter with a view to resolving all issues with outstanding cases as soon as possible.

In respect of the AEOS scheme, there were 8,640 valid AEOS applications due a payment for the 2016 scheme year. Of these, 7,436 have been paid, leaving 1,204 outstanding. Under the EU regulations governing the scheme and other area-based payment schemes, a comprehensive administrative check, including cross-checks with the land parcel identification system, must take place. As 2016 is the final scheme year of payment for the AEOS 2 scheme, rechecks on payments made for all scheme years must be completed before final payments can be processed. This work is ongoing and payments for valid checked files are and will continue to be released on a weekly basis.

A number of payments under both schemes continue to be held up due to incomplete documentation and all participants are reminded to respond to any correspondence and submit any outstanding documentation as soon as possible to facilitate payment. Payments under both schemes will continue on an ongoing basis as issues are resolved and cases are cleared for payment.

Photo of Charlie McConalogueCharlie McConalogue (Donegal, Fianna Fail)
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It is a disgrace that 3,000 farmers across the country are still waiting for GLAS payments in May 2017 and over 1,200 are awaiting payments under AEOS. The Minister and Department made a commitment that they would be paid in October 2016. Then another commitment was made that they would be paid in December 2016. At a recent farmer's charter of rights meeting, the Minister and Department committed that all payments would be made by the end of April.

On three occasions deadlines were set and promises made and on three occasions they have been not been met and have been broken. As a result, over 4,000 farmers across the country are waiting on GLAS and AEOS payments.

On a county basis, 200 farmers in Donegal and as many as 400 in Galway are waiting on GLAS payments. The situation is totally unacceptable and it is a political failure on the part of the Minister to manage the issue and ensure farmers are paid on time. If it was the other way around and farmers were not compliant with the scheme, the Department would come down on them and would not be behind the door in terms of applying penalties. Yet, whenever the problem is at the Minister's end and he fails to live up to his responsibilities and promises, he expects a free pass.

I know it is probably a fruitless exercise to ask the Minister to set another deadline and make another promise but can he tell us when the outstanding payments will be made? Can tell us how many GLAS 1 and 2 farmers are on the Department's system? How many have withdrawn from the scheme and how many will be ineligible for payments as per the Department's calculations?

Photo of Michael CreedMichael Creed (Cork North West, Fine Gael)
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I am not happy that this is the case. It is an embarrassment to me and the Department that this issue continues.

We have no vested interest in holding onto moneys that are due. It is an extraordinarily complex scheme with more than 30 individual actions into which a farmer can opt under GLAS. When one cross references that with basic payment applications and individual plots, it becomes a very complex scheme to administer from an IT point of view. We have applied additional resources but it is taking a great deal longer than we had hoped to resolve the matter.

I was not at the farmers' charter meeting recently but for clarity I note that I understand that the commitment that was given was that all approved applicants would be paid by the end of April. I emphasise "approved". We continue to engage with a number of farmers in respect of outstanding documentation which is an issue on their side. I would have preferred to have been able to identify and correspond with those farmers earlier. I appreciate the financial consequences for those individual holdings and the fact that it makes budgeting difficult if one is expecting every week that a cheque for up to €5,000 will arrive. I assure farmers that we are doing everything possible. We have written to 1,500 of the 3,000 farmers in GLAS who are waiting and I hope we will have corresponded by the end of the week with the overwhelming majority of the remaining 1,500.

On the Deputy's specific question, the number of farmers currently active in GLAS I is 25,460 and in GLAS II is 11,345. The number of farmers approved in the most recent GLAS tranche is 13,600.

2:45 pm

Photo of Charlie McConalogueCharlie McConalogue (Donegal, Fianna Fail)
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I thank the Minister for the response. Last December, farmers were waiting for a payment of up to €4,500 which they had factored into their financial year last year and their income plans for Christmas. It was one thing to be embarrassed that it was not paid then, but the Minister is still embarrassed in May with over 4,000 farmers continuing to wait for payments. It is a political failure to allocate sufficient resources to deal with the issue and to ensure that farmers were not left in the lurch, which is what has happened. That is down to how it was handled by the Minister and the Department.

In the coming year and the current budget, €214 million is allocated for GLAS. There was a commitment that when the scheme was up and running at the maximum of 50,000, there would be a €250 million per year spend. What the Minister has in the budget for this year's payments is €36 million less than was initially indicated would be required. That is the Minister stoking up a situation where there will be insufficient funds to pay all of those who will be expecting payments at the back end of this year. Can the Minister comment on that? It behoves him, considering what happened last year, to make every effort and adopt every measure to ensure a similar scenario does not emerge at the end of this year. First and foremost, those who are still awaiting payment should be paid promptly and as a matter of priority. Efforts to do that must be made by the Minister.

Photo of Michael CreedMichael Creed (Cork North West, Fine Gael)
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This year is the first full run of GLAS payments and there are problems which were not foreseeable in respect of the complexity and challenges posed to the IT system. It is not a question of resources from either an IT or staffing perspective, it is simply the volume and complexity of applications and having to walk through each application individually across parcels of land and up to 30 different options. When one is explaining, one is losing. I appreciate that. For farmers who have not been paid yet, it is cold comfort.

As this is the last year of AEOS, there is an obligation to sign off on the full period of the scheme. That is why there is a more onerous duty on us in respect of the final payments on AEOS. Equally, we are working through that obligation.

Deputy McConalogue has raised his point before about our commitments under the rural development programme generally and specifically in respect of the funding under this scheme. We will spend every penny of that funding and pay out. I suspect it will be like this year's basic payment scheme. Once we got through the teething problems associated with the first run of that last year, most people accepted that the initial payments ran through much more efficiently last October. I hope that what we are seeing now with GLAS I and GLAS II will not be replicated in future.