Allister grills new Minister on Rural Development waste
08 June 2011
With an opening reference to the new minister’s inexperience of agricultural issues the North Antrim MLA asked:-
Mr Allister: I appreciate that the Minister may only have been a reader of ‘Farming Life’ for about three weeks, but she must be aware of the unease in the rural community about the mismanagement of the rural development programme by her predecessor. That dates back to the overloading of the programme in comparison to axis 1 and the gross mismanagement in administration. When the first £5·5 million of funding was announced, it emerged that £3 million of it went on administration. Will she give us the up-to-date, accurate figure for how much of the money from the rural development programme that has been allocated has been wasted on administration?
As the Minister was unable to give the breakdown between bureaucracy costs and money actually paid out, Mr Allister now intends to pursue this issue through written Questions.
Commenting Jim Allister said, “The RDP has been mishandled from the outset, with the crucial frontline delivery aspect, Axis 1, underfunded and Axis 3 overloaded. Its slow roll-out has compounded the situation with as much going on administration as on delivery. The last minister never got to grips with the issue and I doubt if this one will do any better.
“It must never be forgotten that the redistribution which is going on through Axis 3 is in significant measure farmer’s money, since a third of it comes from modulation. Thus to see so much of it wasted on bureaucracy is hard to take. It is very frustrating for the farming community to see money they were required to contribute wasted on and stranded within DARD’s bureaucracy.”
