Denis Naughten (Longford-Roscommon, Fine Gael)
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Question 330: To ask the Minister for Agriculture and Food the cost of installing and maintaining the computer system for the issue of the single farm payment; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [27751/05]

Mary Coughlan (Donegal South West, Fianna Fail)
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The single payment scheme project will deliver computer systems to deal with all aspects of the single payment and the disadvantaged area scheme, including land information, the establishment and trading of entitlements, cross compliance and payments.

The Department opted for the earliest implementation date allowable. Details of the relevant regulations have been subject to ongoing negotiation. Consequently, this project has been phased to ensure that the various elements of the system have been available at the various stages as required. This is being done to an extremely tight deadline. The overall project is running to schedule. Fully decoupled payments are expected to commence on 1 December 2005.

The development of systems for calculation of individual entitlements and creation of the national database of entitlements was completed, culminating in the issue of provisional entitlements to farmers earlier this year. The system to manage the process of annual claims for the single payment is under development and will be ready to issue payments to farmers in December.

It will be necessary to build further systems in 2006 to facilitate trading of single payment entitlements, and to implement additional EU cross-compliance requirements. The external costs to date are under €4 million. The costs of the systems to be built in 2006 are still the subject of negotiation. The future maintenance costs of the system will be dictated by the level of functionality required, as further regulations are implemented. The systems extensively re-use work already carried out on the iMAP system, developed for the premia — disadvantaged area schemes. This has greatly reduced the cost. These systems will support annual payments of approximately €1.5 billion.