CO-OPERATIVE GAIN

Words by: Spence Gunn

Growers belonging to 33 co-operative groups have received some welcome clarity on the continuity of their grant funding.

Until Brexit, producer organisations – or POs – had been receiving matchfunding grants under the EU Fruit and Vegetable Aid Scheme to support a range of productivity-related investments and marketing activities.

As part of the post-Brexit transition to the UK’s own agricultural policies and support mechanisms, the government had promised to fund POs to enable them to complete their current programmes.

For some, however, that would have meant money running out between now and 2023, when a UK replacement scheme is due to be introduced.

“We know Defra is looking at options for a new scheme and we’ve been talking with them about ways to make it more accessible to a wider range of growers,” says NFU Horticulture and Potatoes Board chair Ali Capper, whose tree fruit enterprise is itself a member of a PO.

“But as the current scheme closes to new entrants next year, and with no decisions yet on its replacement, we’ve been increasingly concerned there would be a funding gap.”

The NFU had ramped up lobbying on the issue, while the value of POs, which account for more than half of all British-grown fruit and veg, was underlined in the National Food Strategy report published in July (see p14). It called for ‘a less bureaucratic, more inclusive and better-funded successor to the EU scheme’.

Defra says it is increasing its engagement with the horticulture sector to establish what support is needed to help meet government ambitions for productivity and sustainability. It sees POs as part of that and, at Fruit Focus in July, it announced plans ‘to ensure a smooth transition to future support’.

It said POs with operational programmes ending before the existing scheme closes will be able to implement ‘new, shorter operational programmes’ to bridge the gap.

There will be some changes to what can be funded, but the overall amount that a PO can claim will remain at current levels: 50% of eligible expenditure or 4.1% of marginal product value, whichever is the lower.

“The devil will be in the detail and we’re still waiting to see some of that,” says Mrs Capper.

“But we now know if your current programme ends this year you will be able to put in for a new one covering a three-year period.”

Wye Fruit is among the POs with scheme agreements ending this year.

It has been a cooperative for tree and soft fruit growers since the early 1960s and has 12 members.

“We naturally fitted the PO scheme when that began,” says Wye Fruit’s accountant and PO scheme administrator, Chris Fletcher.

“Our board was very concerned that we’d have been left high and dry if our current five-year support agreement ended without prospect of a replacement, so the Defra announcement is really welcome.

“We are committed to being a coop, so we would have stayed together anyway. But without match-funding for a new plan we’d have seen our investment budget halved for things like packhouse improvements, automation, storage and work on new varieties and growing systems.

“It would have meant, for us and all the other POs, putting a brake on the rate of productivity improvements just at the time when we are all being asked to step it up.”