This topic has been incredibly divisive,just a couple of points most hill and upland farms have region 1 land on them and this is where most of this money would have been generated as all our subs have derived from production based subsidies so the most productive land generated the most sub. If this money was all paid to region 2&3 there would be cases of massive over compensation,I have one friend who would be in line for a half million pound windfall also do you really want vast amounts of this hard won money going to Swedish millionaires who happen to own huge swathes of the highlands,I think most people just want a fair distribution of this money although I do realise that each persons perspective of fair is different.
wrong, if it had been passed up from westminster at the time it wOuld just increase our budget and be divided the normal way across regions, now it is passed up many years later at a time when lfa is being cut and theyre simply using it to plug the gap in LFA so the rest of the farmers are missing out!
EXACTLY, most of the hills are owned by very few people lets not forget that
was LFA not supposed to be getting phased out anyway?
I’m sorry but you seem to have got the wrong end of the stick on this one ,this was never lfa money the convergence money is to correct an underpayment of the basic payments scheme.
Correct. This money was paid to the UK government by the EU because Scotland’s payment per hectare was the second lowest in the whole EU after the last CAP reform. It was meant to come straight to Scottish farmers at that point but David Cameron’s defra minister at the time syphoned it off and spread it across the whole UK. The NFUS at the time, lead iirc by Alan Bowie blew a bit of hot wind and then let it drop. This money was designed for the upland farmers and no one else. It would be a catastrophe if the snp now use it to augment the lfass payment to save their own blushes. That was not what Jim Walker fought for
which is why they - and nobody else should get it!!!Absolutely agree. What I am against is the snp using it to make up the shortfall in lfass payments due to their own financial mismanagement. The converge money should be going to active livestock farmers in the lfa areas and paid on top of the lfass money , not instead of.Which is all LFA areas
The SNP are paying it as a 'top up' to the LFASS because they are against LFASS being done away with.
Jim Walker is very much happier with the SNP proposal of distribution than the NFUS' idea
Do we get that for 2 years?