Our public consultation on the future CAP proposals officially closed at midnight. Many thanks to all who took the time to respond.

Not surprisingly we had more responses on the Direct Payments regulation – which has the greatest potential impact and is most dependent on the results of the negotiations – than on the other proposals. We had 203 responses to the online questionnaire on Direct Payments, 75 on the rural development proposals and 63 on the “horizontal” regulation on financing and monitoring the CAP.

As soon as possible we will publish the basic results of the online questionnaire, which we’ll also be sharing with our stakeholder group next week. In slower time we’ll do some more detailed analysis and we’ll publish that in due course too.

A few respondents felt the questionnaire format didn’t give them scope to make the points they wanted to, and chose to write in instead. As I’ve said before, this format was something of an experiment and we knew there was a trade off between detail and length. We always said we were happy to get stakeholder views in whatever format, so those comments will be taken on board too. But the vast majority engaged with the questionnaire, for which we’re very grateful.