Streamlined farm visits to reduce regulatory burden

The Environment Agency’s new streamlined farm inspection system will reduce the overall regulatory burden on farmers and improve efficiency by allowing different regulations to be assessed in a single visit.

The Farm Assessment and Regulatory Management System (FARMS¬) is a computerised system using paper-less mobile technology that allows farm visits to be prioritised based on highest environmental risk.

With around 162,000 farms in England and Wales requiring permits or registration on up to ten different regulations, many farms have historically been subject to separate visits by different inspectors in order to determine compliance.

FARMS brings together all the permits, registrations, historical inspection reports and environmental data that apply to a particular farm and creates an individual risk-score. The score will determine how often a farm needs to be inspected and allows for different regulations to be assessed simultaneously – reducing the burden on farmers.

Environment Agency Director of Environment Protection, Tricia Henton, said: "FARMS is a major step forward in our risk-based approach to regulation, allowing the Environment Agency to target efforts where they are needed most and reduce the regulatory burden on individual farmers by bringing more efficient and fewer inspections."

For each individual farm, the FARMS system automatically collates the data and key information into a single inspection-form, with minimal repetition of data collected. The inspection form is on a hand-held, rugged mobile computer so the environment officer can sit down with a farmer and input information on the spot. This is then transferred to our central database.

FARMS was developed with the help of SciSys and is a cornerstone of the Environment Agency’s Integrated Regulation (IR) programme. IR has been developed as a direct response to the Government’s drive to reduce administrative burdens on industry coupled with the use of a risk based approach as embodied in the Hampton report.

For more information visit www.environment-agency.gov.uk