Under the AIE Regs to request, details of fines for breach of cross compliance rules related to the protection of water against pollution for the years 2019, 202 and 2021
Note: these would be fines for breaches found on farms during, with incidents resulting in penalties for the farmers.
For example, would cover fines for the likes of slurry spreading and nutrient run-off from farmyards
Please provide in electronic format, by year and by County
Response to AIE
This Department carries out Cross Compliance inspections, which can identify breaches of water quality regulations. The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine (DAFM) also carry out similar
inspections on behalf of Local Authorities.
The following tables identifies the number of inspections carried out for the 2019 and 2020 scheme years carried out by this Department and the Local Authority inspections.
Details of Statutory Management Requirements (SMR) 1 Protection of Water against Pollution caused by Nitrates breaches with financial penalty are also included.
In relation to your request that data be provided on a county-by-county basis, please note this Department does not provide county specific breakdowns on inspections as the annual inspection programme, including the risk analysis selection process, operates on a national basis.
As the 2021 Inspection year is currently in progress, the requested 2021 statistics are not yet available.
This Department availed of EU derogation with regards to certain administrative and on-the-spot checks applicable within the common agricultural policy provided under Article 9 of Regulation EU 2020/532, due
to the COVID-19 pandemic to reduce the control rate for full Cross Compliance required under Article 68(1) of 809/2014 from 1% to at least 0.5%. Therefore, the number of such inspections, and resulting outcome data, is lower in 2020.
As an applicant may incur non-compliances in more than one SMR or GAEC standard and the rules for the calculation of the final penalty to apply, as prescribed in the governing EU regulations, allows for ‘maxing’ of penalty within areas of non-compliance, etc., it is not possible to provide monetary values or % of BPS payments for penalties applied at individual SMR or GAEC standard level.