Use of farmland around Errol Airfield: FOI release

FOI reference: FOI/17/01805
Date received: 2 August 2017
Date responded: 29 August 2017

Information requested

Information that we hold, based on applications for and payments made of farm subsidies, of the various agricultural land uses of an area of land subject to a planning application for development.

Response

I must explain that we obviously have to balance the level of detail that we can release to you under such a request against the Data Protection Act that protects the personal data for any individual person.

I can now confirm that within the area identified by the red boundary on the plan attached to your request for application ref. PK16/00999/AMM, there are seven individual fields, totalling a gross area of 34.11 hectares, registered on our Field Identification System(FIS). I can further confirm that in 2017, four of these fields, with a total area of 22.07 hectares, are declared on the Single Application Form (SAF) system to be in an agricultural production land use that is eligible for the Basic Payment Scheme. The other three fields are declared to be in a use that excludes them from payments from the scheme. The land use has been declared as "Exclusion".

All of the land covered by the PK16/01491/FLL planning application is registered on FIS and all is declared to be in agricultural production as cereal cropping on the 2017 SAF. The area shown on the map attached to your e-mail includes one whole field of 6.98 hectares and part of another field. At this stage, I can't measure that part to decimal figures but I assume that the total area is included in the planning application.

I would be happy to try to describe and discuss the systems and/or payment schemes that I refer to above if you want to call or arrange a meeting sometime. The details of all of our schemes and systems are on our Rural Payments and Services website at www.ruralpayments.org.

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