At the start of last month, Agriculture Minister Andrew Muir confirmed he has instructed DAERA officials to start working on a process to reinstate a recent change to farm cross-compliance penalties.

The issue relates to a decision taken by Minister Muir’s predecessor Edwin Poots, who had decided in 2022 to put a 15% cap on penalties for farmers with repeated negligent breaches of cross compliance rules.

In practice, a single negligent (minor) breach of the rules normally attracts a deduction of up to 5% off farm payments, and if the same breach is repeatedly found over a three-year period, the penalty could be up to 15%. At this stage, DAERA would contact the farmer and warn another breach of the same rule would be seen as intentional, attracting much higher rates of penalty. It was this latter point that Minister Poots changed – repeated negligent breaches of cross compliance would be capped at 15%.

The key point Minister Poots addressed was to prevent a farmer who, for example, had repeatedly breached the limit for missing cattle tags, ending up with a ridiculous penalty running into tens of thousands.

However, the narrative from various green campaigners was that Minister Poots was going soft on persistent polluters.

These campaigners seem to have no concept that cross-compliance covers a wide variety of issues well beyond just farm pollution. They also conveniently miss the fact that the number of farm inspections ramped up significantly during the tenure of Minister Poots.

Answer

The lack of understanding around these issues is exposed in a recent written answer given by Minister Muir to DUP MLA William Irwin, who asked about negligent and intentional breaches of cross compliance rules.

In 2023, just eleven farmers (out of over 24,000) had penalties capped at 15% following the change by Minister Poots, so the number of farmers benefitting is already incredibly low, never mind the fact most of these negligent cases are nothing to do with the environment.

If Minister Muir wants to waste DAERA resources reversing the decision of Minister Poots, that is his prerogative. But doing so is simply about optics and appeasing the ill-informed.