What are the price rises?

Among the price rises are:

• A ten-fold increase in the cost of new applications to £3,728 for land spreading of spent or unused sheep dip.
• Changes to permits for farming installations for the rearing of pigs and poultry with the cost of new applications rising from £7,322 to £9,270.  The cost of permit variations will rise from £388 to £5,562.
•  A 6% increase for a number of the annual fees NRW charges to recover the costs of monitoring and assessing compliance with permit conditions was introduced in April. 

Scale of the increase

After engaging with its membership, NFU Cymru submitted a 21-page response to NRW’s Strategic Review of Charges (SROC) consultation, which asked for a justification as to the scale of the increases and also questioned the timing of the changes when the industry is facing the sustained impact of significant inflationary pressures.

NFU Cymru Rural Affairs Board Chairman Hedd Pugh said: “We are extremely disappointed that despite the industry raising legitimate concerns over the significant rises to fees and charges, that Natural Resources Wales has persisted and Welsh Government has approved these staggeringly expensive proposals with the changes due to be applied from this week.

Inflationary pressures on producers

“The inflationary pressures put on primary producers over the last 18 months have been well documented. It will be difficult for many farm businesses to absorb these new higher costs imposed by NRW at a time when the legacy of those well-publicised rises in input costs will continue to impact farming businesses long after the input costs themselves have settled. News of these hikes in regulatory fees and charges are a double blow for farmers.

“NFU Cymru fully appreciates that NRW has a duty to recover its costs, but the scale of some of these rises is hard to justify and it is regrettable that the regulator hasn’t been able to focus on becoming more efficient and streamline the application and delivery of the charging scheme to reduce the costs to fee payers. We feel that the set charges from Saturday could well run the risk of disincentivising best practice and hinder on-farm investment and diversification opportunities as the costs have now simply become too prohibitive.”

Read the short briefing on the NFU Cymru response to NRW