ELS Greening Reductions Published September 19, 2014 12:00 am As we have previously stated, the EU does not allow double funding; that is getting paid twice for the same action. Under the new CAP Greening rules a number of ELS and OELS options (37 in total) come under this ‘double funding’ heading. The deductions that Environmental Stewardship agreement holders with these options will face have now been published. Remember that these only apply to those agreements starting on or after 1st January 2012 or that are not combined with an HLS; around 4,000 in total. Payments will be reduced even if there is enough other EFA area to meet the greening requirements. For those affected there are some key points to note: deductions are in the range of 65-100%. if holding is exempt from the EFA element of Greening then the reductions will not apply. Examples would be if there is under 15 Ha of arable land on the holding, or if you have more than 75% of your arable area as temporary grass/fallow etc. The organic exemption does not count in this case. However if the claimant does not qualify for an exemption in future years the payment reduction could be applied in the future. different payment reductions apply if your agreement start date was between 1st January 2012 and 1st December 2012 (this is due to the different payment rates operating under 3rd and 4th Editions of the Handbooks) Affected ES agreement holders are being written to individually. They have three options when faced with payment reductions, they must inform Natural England by 15th November 2014 on any changes they wish to make. They can; accept the reduced payment, Natural England will assume this is the case if they do not hear otherwise add additional ES options to ‘top-up’ points to get back to 30 per Ha, options which have been reduced can be used but the new (lower) points value will need to be used. withdraw from the ES agreement without penalty. The full publication including a list of all the payment reductions can be found at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/cap-reform-how-we-will-manage-double-funding-greening-and-environmental-stewardship
