Scottish SPS Consultations October 31, 2013 12:00 am The Scottish Government seems some way behind the other GB administrations in terms of consulting. It appears to be planning for a consultation to run from December to March, see –http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Resource/0043/00435592.pdf. The Scottish Government has to make the same decision as England on modulation rates by the 31st December. Presumably therefore, Ministers will just decide this without reference to the wider industry. Much of the delay in Scotland centres around the tricky issue of regionalisation. ScotGov’s preferred route was to split the country into three regions based on land classification. These would be arable/temporary grass, permanent pasture and rough grazing. Therefore each field would be put into one of the three regions based on its past use. A farm could potentially have land in all three ‘regions’. Permanent pasture would actually get the highest payment rate as arable land is thought to be able to cope with less support. (This is known as an ‘Olympic distribution’, due to the medal podium – highest in the middle.) It seems that the EU Commission has raised objections to this model. Therefore, Scotland may end up with a regional split simply between ‘rough grazing’ and all other land. This would make it very similar to the likely final regions in both Wales and England.
