On 6th December Hilary Benn announced the final approval of the RDPE 2007 to 2013 programme. The full announcement can be found at http://www.defra.gov.uk/news/2007/071206f.htm
The headline good news is the securing of £3.9bn of funding over seven years for rural development, £2.9bn of that delivered through Environmental Stewardship schemes, with a further £600m through the RDA's. This presents FWAG with a range of fantastic opportunities to continue to deliver high quality on-farm advice on biodiversity, landscape and access, water quality and climate change.
The bad news is the confirmation that management plans have now been removed from Environmental Stewardship. This applies to all provisional ES agreements signed from 1st January 2007. Of the 5400 provisional agreements, 2600 have management plans and 1800 of these will fall below the ELS points threshold when the plans are removed.
FWAG continues to meet with Defra, Natural England and the NFU to discuss the approach to deal with all 2600 agreement holders. NE will be in a position to announce their initial programme of contact with agreement holders hopefully next week (w/c 10th December) and we will post further information when we have it.
With full support from the NFU, we have put forward a proposal involving a combination of Workshops/clinics and 1 to 1 visits to provide help to farmers who are faced with having to resubmit applications, which we continue to discuss further with NE staff.
The initial Q & A can be found at http://www.defra.gov.uk/erdp/rdp07_13/sectf.htm . This Q & A is very general around RDPE approval. More detailed questions have been supplied to Natural England by FWAG & the NFU to which we are awaiting a response.
ELS and HLS packs will be being issued again from Monday 10th December in all regions. They will contain an update note confirming Management plans have been withdrawn from the scheme.
Our immediate advice to farmers affected by this situation is to sit tight until matters clarify. NE will honour payments on all agreements to date and will be contacting agreement holders in the near future.
We will continue to update you as we can and would appreciate any feedback.
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