Willie Penrose (Westmeath, Labour)
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Question 431: To ask the Minister for Agriculture and Food if she will take steps to reduce the complex, bureaucratic and oppressive inspection regime, that her Department has put in place, which incorporates a document consisting of 66 pages covering 1,450 different questions, sections and permutations and requires her Department's inspector's signature in 28 different places; if same will be reviewed and significantly reduced, in so far as that the checklists as outlined go beyond the interpretations of EU regulations; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [8243/07]

Mary Coughlan (Donegal South West, Fianna Fail)
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The position is that under the Charter of Rights for Farmers, my Department is committed to ensuring the maximum level of integration of inspections across all areas including inspections under the Single Payment Scheme, the Disadvantaged Areas Scheme and the Rural Environment Protection Scheme. This integration means that control checks are carried out in relation to eligibility of land declared, identification and registration of animals on the holding, and compliance with the other 18 Statutory Management Requirements (SMRs) under cross-compliance in one farm visit. On this basis, the overall number of annual inspections associated with the Single will be in the region of 7,200. This is a very significant reduction from the 18,000 inspections annually under the old coupled regime.

My Department is in regular contact with the European Commission with a view to simplification of Single Payment Scheme requirements with particular reference to the arrangements for cross-compliance inspections. In this connection the European Commission is currently undertaking a full review of the cross-compliance regime and the results of that review will be presented to the Council of Ministers during April. In tandem with this, my Department is carrying out a full review of inspection arrangements with a view to simplification where possible while, at the same time, ensuring compliance with the EU regulatory requirements and safeguarding animal funding of €1.9 billion for Irish farmers under direct payment schemes. The review of the inspection report forms together with the outcome of the Commission's review of the cross-compliance arrangements generally, will be fully discussed with the farming organisations before the inspections for 2007 get underway.

I believe that the initiative by the Commission on simplification of the CAP and the review of cross-compliance, provides an opportunity for a fresh look at cross-compliance and other Single Payment Scheme issues. I am certainly pressing for this both in direct contact with Commissioner Fischer Boel and the President of the Council, Minister Seehofer. I raised the matter at the Council recently where several member States had similar problems to ours. It is not surprising then that simplification of the CAP and the cross-compliance regime in particular are core issues for the current German Presidency of the EU. Only last weekend, during an official visit to Paris, I met with both Minister Seehofer and with the French Agriculture Minister on which occasion I raised again the issue of simplification of EU rules for on farm inspection.