Farmers welcome Rural Priorities commitment

However, NFU Scotland has suggested the management of the scheme, one of the Scottish Government’s flagship funding schemes, requires ‘significant improvement’.

The union has called for an overhaul in how such schemes are run, including a new service level agreement with applicants and better management of funding, as well as new processes to deal quicker with smaller-scale projects.

NFUS president Jim McLaren said: “It is difficult to kick a scheme that has ploughed over £300 million into rural areas. It has been a massively important injection of funds.

“However, it is an inescapable fact the administration of the scheme has not been up to scratch. Expectations have been poorly managed, communication has been patchy at best and funding apparently not planned out properly.”

Angus McCall, chairman of the Scottish Tenant Farmers Association, said there were many family farms to whom Rural Priorities had been a closed book. “These smaller farmers could have derived tremendous benefit from modest injections of capital to assist the sustainability of their businesses but, to date, they have felt themselves excluded from applying for business development or agri-environment projects because they are unable to achieve the necessary points.”

Among changes to the scheme, announced this week by Cabinet Secretary for Rural Affairs, Richard Lochhead, are a  £250,000 cap per project for business development applications submitted after last Monday (August 2).

Mr McLaren said to introduce such a cap now was badly timed. It was ‘simply a solution to a funding problem rather than a strengthening of the objectives of the scheme’. Mr McCall welcomed the cap decision, but said it had come ‘far too late’. It would have made more sense to set a ceiling at the start of the programme to allow maximum penetration of Rural Priorities and to have raised the ceiling towards the end of the scheme if necessary.

Have your say

Please do not complete the following form field for security reasons.

Name

E-mail

Comment

Post as

Anonymously

Display name