Cap Reform Blog

Billy McKenzie, Scotland Rural Development Programme Manager blogs about the consultation for the next Rural Development Programme.

At the time of writing this I am preparing for our roadshow in Tarbet, Argyll on the next Scotland Rural Development Programme (SRDP) which will run from 2014 to 2020.

As some of you will know we launched our first consultation on the next SRDP on 1 May.  Although the regulations are still be negotiated in Europe we can’t sit back and wait until they are agreed.  We need to keep working on the next SRDP to make sure we can have it in place as quickly as possible after the current programme ends on December 31 this year.

Since the consultation launched I, and colleagues, have been travelling the length and breadth of the country holding roadshows to discuss the consultation.  So far we have spoken to over 400 people, with lively and interesting discussions.  I am pleased to see people so engaged in this, even if it does make it challenging at times!  We have a number of big issues to grapple with including where and how do we focus spending with the expected reduced budget, and how can we improve administration of the grant schemes.

We still have five roadshows to go – so hopefully you will be able to come along if you have not already been to one.  I know that not everyone can get to the roadshows so to help provide some more information I have prepared a podcast outlining what the consultation is all about and a short video from the roadshows.  I also thought it would be helpful to produce a simple summary document which highlights the key points in the consultation.  All of these can be found on our website along with the full consultation document and details of the rest of the roadshows

This coming week is one of three or four big meetings.

I wrote this blog as I was travelling out for Monday’s Council of Ministers meeting in Brussels.  The Irish Presidency will report back on its negotiations with the representatives of the European Parliament, and more importantly will ask the member states whether they are willing to compromise with the Parliament on certain points – specifically whether the small farmer simplified scheme, the young farmer direct payment top up, and the ‘negative list’ of business types a priori ineligible for direct payments, should be an option for those member states that want to use them, or compulsory for all.  Our view is that in the name of not imposing red tape where it’s not necessary, they should all be optional.

While in Brussels we will also be dropping in on the Commission for some discussions.

Then on Wednesday our internal steering group will be looking at two big issues.  First, how to take forward our direct payments modelling, in light of our conference in April and comments received since; and secondly, an analysis of the prospects for using the ‘different but equivalent’ approach to the greening of direct payments here in Scotland.

Finally on Friday our CAP stakeholder group will meet to discuss all of those and other issues.

Looking around me at the airport, I couldn’t help but be slightly jealous of all the people who are jetting off with their golf clubs – and frustrated at how slow the queue at check-in is moving (can’t wait till the airline starts offering online check-in again).  But it’s a sobering thought that after this Council meeting, the next one is due to be the decisive endgame.  There will still be loads to do thereafter, but the end, at least of this phase of the CAP reform process, really is nigh!

Today we pass another significant milestone on the journey to the new CAP in Scotland, with the publication of the first of two consultation documents on the next Scotland Rural Development Programme, and the first of our roadshow of evening meetings tonight in Portree.

I’ve written before about the process we went through last year, with eight working groups of stakeholders and government officials looking at what the content of the next SRDP should be, and how it could be delivered.  Those ideas have been pulled together and ‘reality checked’ (for instance, there’s no point us taking forward ideas that wouldn’t be legal under the EU regulations) and now form the basis of the consultation document.

This first consultation looks at the big picture issues rather than the detail: questions like what kind of measures should the new SRDP contain, how can the delivery model be improved, how can we better encourage collaborative projects, and so on.  There will be more than a dozen evening meetings on it around the country  where anyone with an interest can come and hear about it from the horse’s mouth.  Meanwhile the detailed design of the measures within the SRDP will be the subject of a second consultation later in the summer.

It’s a sunny morning here in Luxembourg, and it looks like we’ll have something to smile about when the Council of Ministers meets this morning.

It must be at least a year and a half, possibly longer, since we flagged up at UK and EU level the fact that the timetable for the CAP negotiations would make it simply impossible for member states to have their new rural development programmes written and approved by 1 Jan 2014.  That being the case, a highly undesirable gap between the end of the current SRDP, on 31 Dec 2013, and the start of the next one, would be unavoidable – unless something was done.  We pointed out that the obvious solution would be simply to allow the existing programmes to be extended by a year.

Today in the Council, Commissioner Ciolos is going to present a proposed transitional regulation which comes close to allowing that.  Although we’ve only just received it and haven’t had time for a thorough analysis, it looks like the proposal will allow us to avoid a gap for many of the key elements of the SRDP – LFASS, agri-environment contracts, woodland creation etc.

It doesn’t appear to extend to the entire SRDP, which is disappointing and which we will aim to address during the negotiation.  But it is a huge step forward, and one which we’ve been requesting for a long time now.  So it’s definitely good news.

Phew!  It’s 5pm and the last of the attendees at our conference on modelling future direct payments have left.

There were times in the run-up when I wondered if we’d bitten off more than we could chew.  The subject matter was all about how to divide Scotland into payment regions under the new CAP.  We wanted to model a long list of potential scenarios, to look at the results before narrowing down the list and adding in other elements like coupled support, greening etc.  But was it over-ambitious to try and use a big stakeholder conference to help us with the task of narrowing the list of 30-odd scenarios?

In fact today went brilliantly.  The data is massively complex, but everyone I spoke to welcomed the fact that we’d put it on the table, and complimented our speakers on how clearly they put it across.

We even got a bit of consensus in the breakout sessions in the afternoon.  And of course the whole thing was kicked off by a speech from the Cabinet Secretary in which he shared some of his own thinking on various important aspects of the new CAP.

As always, that speech plus the conference material will be on the website, and any comments are very welcome.

Earlier this week at our stakeholder group meeting, apart from updating everyone on the events of the past couple of weeks in the Council of Ministers and European Parliament, the main agenda item was sharing some initial results from the latest modelling of scenarios for regionalising the future direct payments.

In effect, it was a bit of a dry run in advance of our big stakeholder conference on the subject on 17 April.  And it proved to be a very useful opportunity, because presenting the complex results of a couple of dozen scenarios, in a brief but understandable way, is quite a challenge.

Colleagues from the James Hutton Institute, who have done the modelling for us, gave the presentation, and with the help of stakeholders we identified a number of ways to try and make the way the results are expressed as effective as possible.  But I made sure we gave JHI a big pat on the back – they had done a fantastic job of boiling down 27 scenarios (plus a lot of technical explanation) into a concise presentation, which was a major achievement.

One important point is that the modelling is designed to let us analyse the impact of regionalisation decisions – how to define regions, and how much budget to allocate to each one – separately from everything else.  This means we have to hold all other factors constant, with the result that the modelling doesn’t predict what farmers can actually expect to receive under the new system.  That will come in the next phase of work, and will of course depend on what the final CAP deal looks like.

As always the stakeholder group papers will all go on our website.

Rural Affairs Secretary Richard Lochhead blogs about the outcome of two days of CAP reform talks in Brussels.

Important, exasperating, lengthy. These are just some of the word that could be used to describe the two days of talks on CAP reform in Brussels.

Important because agriculture is vital to Scotland – our farmers put food on our plates and look after our magnificent countryside yet many farm businesses rely on support payments to stay in the black. These reforms will have ramifications for many years to come.

Exasperating because – although ultimately we expect to be able to deliver most of our priorities – we weren’t able to press Scotland’s case directly as the UK Government negotiates on behalf of all the devolved administration.

Unfortunately we were denied access to a crucial meeting with the Commission and the Presidency which was possibly our last chance to exert influence over the shape of the deal reached last night. Coupled payments was an area I would like to have been able to argue for directly as our position differs markedly from that of the UK. I think it’s absurd that the agreement reached in Brussels would leave Scotland on the bottom tier of a two-tier system despite the importance of coupled payments to our livestock sector.

Lengthy because the talks ran on until after 11pm on Tuesday night as the Irish Presidency worked to achieve consensus between the member states.

So where do we go from here?

Now that the Irish Presidency has a mandate the discussions will begin between the Presidency and the European Parliament with a final decision expected by June. We must hope that commonsense wins the day with regard to coupled payments and the Parliament’s view, which had been to adopt a much fairer system, will prevail.

You may have heard journalists on the TV or radio saying that you can tell how serious an international meeting is by how many clean shirts the delegates have brought with them.

Agriculture and Fisheries Council is usually a one clean shirt event for me, arriving on a Sunday night and leaving the following evening.  But this week’s Council meeting is far from usual.  In fact this is a three shirt Council.

As I write this, the first session of the Council is taking place, in which ministers are giving their reactions to the latest CAP texts circulated by the Presidency late last week.  The rest of Monday will be taken up by the Presidency and Commission meeting with each delegation one by one.

Tuesday is due to begin with the Council looking at the small number of other items on the agenda in addition to CAP.  After that it’s pretty much anyone’s guess what will happen when.  In advance, many people were predicting that agreement on the CAP texts will be reached in the early hours of Wednesday morning, but we won’t get a clear idea till well into tomorrow.

Agreement this week is not the final word, as there still has to be negotiation between the Council and of Ministers and the European Parliament.  But it’s a very significant step in this lengthy process of putting the new CAP in place.

We passed a big milestone in the CAP negotiations yesterday when the European Parliament voted through its position on the proposals.  There was an air of excitement in our office as, while some of us were going in and out of meetings, others were at their computers watching the vote play out – and picking up extra snippets of info via emails from Brussels office colleagues who had travelled to Strasbourg to cover it for us.

I’ve only had time to pick up a few main points as yet, but here are a couple of highlights.

The Parliament seems to have confirmed the view taken in its agriculture committee, that coupled payments should be allowed at up to 15 percent of the total.  That’s also Scottish Government’s position, so it’s good news for us.

However, on greening it looks like the Parliament has preferred to stick with the European Commission’s three green measures, albeit in amended form, rather than permitting alternative measures provided they are environmentally equivalent.  We have always said the equivalence option should be made available, not least because otherwise climate change doesn’t really feature in greening despite being the predominant environmental challenge we face.  So when it comes to the final compromises, we will probably be favouring the version of greening being developed in the Council of Ministers, which does envisage permitting equivalent schemes.

The reason I’ve only had time for a quick skim of the EP vote is that I was in Parliament in the afternoon for a debate on CAP and modelling of direct payments.  It’s not my job to take part in political debate, of course, but I might just take the opportunity to clear up a factual point.  The Welsh Government hasn’t told farmers in Wales what they will be getting as payments under the new CAP.  It has gone out to public consultation with some illustrative numbers, but the document states very clearly that they are not final and will definitely change – not least because the negotiations haven’t finished yet. Even in the short time since the consultation document was published, at least two new options have been introduced which, since they didn’t exist at the time, are not reflected in the scenarios.

Our own next tranche of modelling (I like to throw in a French word every now and then to keep my language skills from going rusty) is in full swing.  The plan is to communicate the results to our immediate stakeholder group of 30 to 40 representatives at a stakeholder group meeting; to a wider audience at a workshop next month; and to anyone who’s interested via our website.

Somebody asked me at an event earlier this week how the CAP reform negotiations are going in the Council of Ministers.

By about the end of February, I’d say something like 75% of the text had been pretty much agreed between the member states. As always, the trickiest issues (like greening) had been left till the end, so the 75% already done was, if you like, the easiest bits. And by the end of the March Council meeting on 19^th March (or more likely in the wee small hours of the 20^th), the Council is supposed to have finalised its position sufficiently to give the Presidency a mandate to go ahead and negotiate the final compromise with the European Parliament.

So my summary of how things are going was: we are on track for agreement in March, but having taken over a year to deal with the 75% of easy stuff, we’re now trying to sort out all the remaining 25%, including the hardest bits, in about three weeks!

Things have really needed to accelerate, therefore, and we’ve certainly seen a sense of urgency in the meetings in Brussels at official level. Like all other administrations across the EU, we’ve been having to look at masses of new material, sometimes stretching to literally hundreds of pages, and give views on it almost overnight.

It’s not just a case of continuing to press for the things which we want but which are not yet in the text; we also have to keep an eye on the things we do like about the text, to make sure they don’t get watered down or deleted.

And we’re trying to be really precise about what we want. At the start of the negotiating process, you can get away with saying broad-brush things like “the crop diversification rule must not impinge negatively on farm practices to an extent which is out of proportion with the environmental benefit it delivers.” But at this late stage, general statements like that are no use at all, and instead we have to be saying things like “in Article 30, paragraph 1, it needs to say 20 hectares instead of 15 hectares”.

Meanwhile, next week all attention will turn to the European Parliament where, following the vote in the agriculture committee in January, all MEPs will have the chance to vote on the CAP package. It should be a momentous couple of weeks.