Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, how much her Department has paid in fines for what reasons to the EU in each of the last five years.

I refer the hon. Member to the answer given to the hon. Member for Newton Abbott, Anne Marie Morris, to PQ UIN 31252 on 21 March 2016.

As from financial year 2010/11 Defra has accrued £336m for disallowance following the conclusion of EU audits, broken down by financial year as shown in the table below. This relates to a number of different Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) Schemes over a number of historical scheme years as disallowance is paid in arrears. These are the only fines that have been imposed on Defra by the EU since 2010.

(*) Reflects the sums the European Commission have ruled cannot be reimbursed (i.e. the amounts they have “disallowed”).

Disallowance is applied when we are considered to not have adequate controls in place to protect CAP expenditure, for example, where our inspection processes or the quality of our mapping have been deemed to be insufficient.

We are making a significant investment to improve the quality and currency of our mapping data, which is historically our biggest disallowance risk.

Other key sources of historic disallowance include failures to adequately control cross compliance, the Fruit and Vegetable Producer Organisation scheme and some of the Rural Development schemes.