Figures from Cross Compliance Livestock Stakeholder meeting 2016: FOI release

FOI reference: FOI/17/01741
Date received: 27 July 2017
Date responded: 15 August 2017

Information requested

• An area office breakdown of the figures presented in the 2016 Cross Compliance Livestock Stakeholder Meeting please.

• Do you have the SMR 8 and SMR 7 reductions broken down by category (i.e. no breach, warning letter, 1%, 3%, 5% etc)?

Response

The analysis of breach information you have requested for more recent years is not held by the Scottish Government. However, details of cross compliance inspection findings, including those for 2016 (the most recent year), are published on the Rural Payments and Services website at https://www.ruralpayments.org/publicsite/futures/topics/inspections/all-inspections/cross-compliance/inspection-outcomes/cross-compliance-inspection-statistics/

In addition attached is a spreadsheet detailing 2016 compliant (no breach) SMR 7 and SMR 8 inspections.

Please note –

• For the period 2008-2015, inspection findings are published per farm business e.g. a business with multiple breaches of the same requirement was only counted once and shown in the column of the table under the relevant penalty % for the particular requirement.

• For 2016, inspection findings are published on a breach by breach basis with multiple breaches for the same business (identified by the Reference number) shown on separate rows of the worksheets. The exception is SMR 7 (Cattle ID and Traceability) where each business is only listed once with multiple breaches shown in separate columns.

• The value in the penalty column for all requirements (apart from SMR 7) is the penalty for the breach as if it was the only breach for the business. In most cases if a business has multiple breaches within a particular requirement the penalty for breaching the requirement is the highest of the individual values e.g. the SMR 8 extract for Reference number 110699 shows three breaches. The overall penalty for this business for breaching SMR 8 is 3%.

Ref. Number	Condition Breached	Breach Description	Breach Intent	Breach Extent	Severity	Permanence	Reoccurrence	Penalty
110699	SMR 8Sheep and Goat identification	Individual identities of home bred animals, present on the holding, are not in the records indicating the record of identification or the record of replacement identification have not been maintained.	Negligence	On- Farm	Very Low Effect	Permanent	1ST OFFENCE	1
110699	SMR 8Sheep and Goat identification	The keeper has not replaced lost or illegible identification and/or the record of replacement identification has not been maintained.	Negligence	On- Farm	Very Low Effect	Rectifiable	1ST OFFENCE	0
110699	SMR 8Sheep and Goat identification	The keeper has not replaced lost or illegible identification and/or the record of replacement identification has not been maintained.	Negligence	Off- Farm	Medium Effect	Permanent	1ST OFFENCE	3

The penalty for breaching a requirement become more complicated to calculate if there are multiple breaches that include Intentional and/or 2nd, 3rd, etc Offence assessments. There are also certain rules for calculating the overall penalty if there are breaches across more than one requirement. The rules for calculating the overall penalty are listed in the online guidance at https://www.ruralpayments.org/publicsite/futures/topics/inspections/all-inspections/cross-compliance/detailed-guidance/penalties-for-breaches-of-cross-compliance/ , summerised below.

What happens if more than one breach is found?

There are a number of different rules for working out the overall penalty if more than one breach is found during the calendar year.

For penalty purposes:

• if a breach of a requirement is both part of a GAEC and a SMR it's only considered to be a breach of the SMR

• if there are first-time negligent and/or first-time intentional breaches within the same area of Cross Compliance (see table 1 below) they are considered to be a single breach. The overall penalty is based on the highest individual penalty

• if there are first-time negligent breaches in different areas the individual penalties are added together and capped at five per cent

• if there are first-time intentional breaches in different areas the individual penalties are added together and capped at 100 per cent

• if there are first-time negligent and first-time intentional breaches in different areas of Cross Compliance, the individual penalties are added together and capped at 100 per cent

• if there are reoccurring breaches with penalties of 15 per cent or less the individual penalties are added together and capped at 15 per cent

• if there are reoccurring breaches with penalties of more than 15 per cent the individual penalties are added together and capped at 100 per cent

• if there are only reoccurring breaches with penalties of 15 per cent or less and other first-time negligent breaches the penalty for the reoccurring breaches is added to the other individual penalties and capped at 15 per cent

• if there are only reoccurring breaches with penalties of 15 per cent or less and other first-time Intentional breaches the penalty for the reoccurring breaches is added to the other individual penalties and capped at 100 per cent

• The "Overall penalty" worksheet of the 2016 published spreadsheet shows the overall penalty applied to each business across the whole of cross compliance.

• The relative low number of SMR 7 compliant inspections reflects the fact that one animal with one missing eartag results in a warning letter.

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foi-17-01741 - 2016 SMR 7 and SMR 8 compliant inspections.xlsx

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Excel document

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19.0 kB