Official Report: Minutes of Evidence

The Deputy Chairperson (Mr McAleer): I welcome the following officials to the Committee: Roger Downey, finance director; and Nuala Hennessy and Helen Mullan, in-year financial planning branch. I invite you to brief the Committee.

Mr Roger Downey (Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs): Good morning, everyone. Thank you for the opportunity to brief the Committee today on the Main Estimates and the June monitoring round.

The Main Estimates reflect the opening budget for 2025-26 that the Executive agreed for DAERA on 3 April. Members will recall that I provided an oral briefing on the resource departmental expenditure limit (DEL) and capital DEL draft budget allocations on 6 February. The only additional funding that DAERA was allocated as part of the final Budget was £3·4 million resource DEL for the pay award. No additional capital DEL was allocated to DAERA as part of the final Budget, and the departmental Assembly liaison officer (DALO) wrote to the Committee on the final Budget updates on 12 May. The final Budget was then converted into the Main Estimates format for the Supply resolution and the Budget Bill, which was introduced in the Assembly earlier this week and is due to be debated further next week.

Annex A of the written briefing sets out the detail in the Estimates on how the Department's resource DEL, capital DEL and annually managed expenditure (AME) budgets are split across the various business areas. Annex B of the written briefing is an Estimates memorandum that provides more information and explanations of the tables in annex A. It includes pie charts on the resource DEL and capital DEL planned expenditure. The pie charts mainly reflect where the budgets sit in the Department under each group or agency. Those charts suggest a very small amount of expenditure on climate change science and innovation, but that is really just the spend in Tracey Teague's group. A lot of our climate change science and innovation spend is through the sustainable agriculture programme, the Agri-Food and Biosciences Institute (AFBI) and the work on other sectoral plans for waste, land use and land use change in forestry and fisheries, and those fall under other groups. There are also some bar charts, line graphs and tables showing how budgets have changed over the past year at each Estimates stage and since 2023-24, along with the associated explanatory narrative.

I turn to June monitoring, which is the first monitoring round in this financial year. The Department has one £3·2 million resource DEL bid for bovine tuberculosis (bTB) compensation in light of the latest projections for this year and four capital DEL bids totalling £8·9 million. Those relate to £4 million for the tackling rural poverty and social isolation programme (TRPSI); £2·3 million for the College of Agriculture, Food and Rural Enterprise (CAFRE) estate improvements; £1·3 million for Northern Ireland Environment Agency (NIEA) country park improvements; and £1·3 million for AFBI scientific equipment. There is also one £8 million ring-fenced resource DEL non-cash depreciation bid in the monitoring round. In addition, there are de minimis technical transfers that net to £0·1 million resource DEL into DAERA and £0·3 million capital DEL out of DAERA. There are no reduced requirements, AME changes or non-budget movements in the exercise.

We are conscious that there are a lot of figures in the Estimates in the June monitoring briefing that was provided to the Committee last week, and we are happy to take questions on any of those.

The Deputy Chairperson (Mr McAleer): Good stuff. Thank you. Roger, I see that the Department has submitted a £3·2 million resource DEL bid for bTB compensation. On the basis of current projections, that would be insufficient. Obviously, the Department has a statutory obligation to fund that: does the Department have a contingency, if that amount is not met?

Mr Downey: This is the start of a year of bidding to the Executive. It is a statutory obligation, so the Executive have funded bTB compensation in the past. Therefore, it is more likely that we would get a bid met for bTB compensation than for anything else. We will also review budgets throughout the year, and, if there is no funding forthcoming from the Executive at June monitoring, we will have as far as the January monitoring round to bid again. In the intervening period, we will review budgets across the Department. Nothing stays the same. At the beginning of the year, things move on as things happen, so there will be easements and pressures. We will review the position then. We will just play it by ear and come back to the Committee in future monitoring rounds.

The Deputy Chairperson (Mr McAleer): The Department has bid for £8·9 million of capital DEL, and £4 million of that is for TRPSI. Do you have a breakdown of what the £4 million will be earmarked or identified for?

Mr Downey: In TRPSI?

The Deputy Chairperson (Mr McAleer): Yes.

Mr Downey: I will ask Nuala to answer that.

Ms Nuala Hennessy (Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs): The £4 million is broken down into £1·7 million for the rural micro capital grant scheme; £1·8 million for the rural business development grant scheme; £0·3 million for access and inclusion; and £0·2 million for the village catalyst scheme. The schemes are in conjunction with DFC.

The Deputy Chairperson (Mr McAleer): Are there timelines for the schemes?

Ms Hennessy: I do not have those with me.

The Deputy Chairperson (Mr McAleer): OK. Thank you very much.

Mr McGlone: Paragraph 7 of the accompanying letter states:

What are your estimates of the level of bTB and the potential expenditure needs for the incoming year?

Mr Downey: The bTB compensation projection is £47·4 million for 2025-26, and that is up from the last financial year, which was £43·1 million. That is an increase of £4·3 million on last year.

Mr McGlone: I am thinking more of that figure plus the associated costs: the usual overall cost.

Mr Downey: The overall cost of the programme?

Mr McGlone: Yes, including the veterinary costs and all the associated departmental costs. Was it £60-odd million for this year?

Mr Downey: Yes. For 2024-25, the final expenditure for the whole programme was just over £60 million. I do not have the full projections for this year, but it is fair to say that, if the bTB compensation element is increasing by £4·3 million under the latest projections, the overall cost will, all things being equal, be over £65 million by the end of this financial year.

Mr McGlone: OK.

The Deputy Chairperson (Mr McAleer): Thank you very much, Nuala, Roger and Helen. No doubt, we will see you again.