‘Fairness and independence must remain key objectives in the upcoming area-based schemes review of decisions.’
This was the message that Ulster Farmers’ Union (UFU) had for Northern Ireland’s Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs (DAERA).
DAERA has recently proposed to replace the current two-stage process with a single-stage review, the UFU has said.
This would mean that the second stage external panel would be replaced by a case officer within a new single-stage process who would engage directly with applicants who feel the department’s original decision was not correct, the organisation deduced.
UFU President Barclay Bell commented on the move, saying: “It would be fair to say that the wider farming community has no faith in the internal stage one appeal within the current two-stage process.
The farming community believes the overall process would need to be improved without fundamentally removing the independent stage two review.
According to Bell, the major problem regarding the appeals process is the incorrect interpretation by the inspector at grass-root level of the EU regulation on cross compliance.
Without a panel and associated stage two process, there would be no facility for an independent person/body to identify any wrongly interpreted legislation and give advice to DAERA to improve such issues in the future, the president added.
“DAERA wants to put a new process in place that would mean decisions would be made quicker.
“A significant backlog does exist within the present review process, primarily due to applications made under the ‘active farmer’ category for area-based schemes, but this will rectify itself over time so it is wrong to introduce a new streamlined process to simply facilitate quicker decisions.
While timeliness is important, we as a union do not believe a faster decision would result in a fairer decision.
“Fairness is the most important outcome of the appeals process. No time frame should be used to inhibit a fair and impartial result.
“Furthermore, this new proposed process will require a new team of DAERA staff starting from scratch and I would question if DAERA could guarantee that the new team would have sufficient resource and would be capable and have enough experience to undertake this process with the same level of efficiency and fairness?
“We see no reason why the existing process could not be improved while still providing the key objectives of fairness and independence,” Bell concluded.