Róisín Shortall (Dublin North West, Labour)
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Question 50: To ask the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food the measures he will take to reduce the cost of farm inspections from the €1,800 per inspection in the Comptroller and Auditor General's report; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [45188/10]

Brendan Smith (Cavan-Monaghan, Fianna Fail)
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The C&AG Report on the cost of farm inspections estimated that the total cost of the farm inspection service in 2009 was €15.8m including direct salary, overheads, imputed pension costs, and travel and subsistence. This covered the cost of all 152 staff in the Integrated Control Division (ICD) and works out at a cost of €1,800 per inspection.

It should be noted that:

The €15.8m figure covers all staff including supervisory and back-up administrative staff and not just the 90 Technical Agricultural Officers who carried out the actual inspections.

These figures are based on full salary recovery for all 152 staff including 40% for overheads and a 13% imputed pension cost.

The inspection staff involved carried out over 3,000 additional commonage and remote sensing inspections in 2009. The C&AG report just concentrates on the 8,650 cross-compliance and eligibility checks to the exclusion of these others.

The report imputes no value to the additional work carried out by the 152 staff in ICD in the areas of other 'on the spot' inspections, liaison with the Commission/auditors and industry, risk analysis, improved processing and mapping, resolving farmers' queries, etc. The staff's output is simply determined by 8,650 inspections.

Even if the C&AG's gross figure of €15.8m is accepted, it pales into relative insignificance in terms of the intrinsic value of these inspections (from a legal and practical point of view) in protecting the €1,800m in direct payments paid to farmers each year. This is an administrative cost of 0.9% to underpin the income platform that determines farmers' livelihoods. These inspections underpin the direct payments system.

My Department has always accepted the need to avoid duplication of inspections and to maximise efficiencies and has acted accordingly. To this end, my Department has accepted the C&AG's recommendation that "in order to arrive at more refined costing based on the size and intensity of each inspection, relevant data would need to be collected and norms established." This would allow the cost per inspection to be determined based on the actual time spent by inspectors on the farm and in producing the inspection report and will give a more targeted and accurate costing using the C&AG's pricing methodology.

In 2010 while 10,176 individual farms were selected for inspection some 4,737 farms had their compliance under the various schemes and requirements including Single Payment Scheme, Disadvantaged Areas Scheme, area eligibility for REPs, Grassland Sheep Scheme, Suckler Cow, animal identification and registration and cross compliance including some 18 individual statutory management requirements, where applicable, checked in one visit. A further 3,172 farms were checked for area eligibility by remote sensing (satellite) thus removing the need for an on-farm visit. In addition a further 1,500 farms were checked for compliance with the GAP (Good Agricultural Practice) Regulations concerning water quality on behalf of Local Authorities.