Red tape 'shutting farmers out' of valuable tourism market, says UUP: Call to relax planning laws to help Northern Ireland catch up to England
Northern Ireland’s farmers risk being left behind their counterparts in England, the UUP’s deputy leader has said, with red tape fencing them off from a potentially lucrative tourist market.
A few weeks ago, Westminster relaxed England’s planning rules for farms around tourism and leisure uses, a change that’s meant to help landowners open up new income streams and boost visitor numbers.
But here the system is as tight as ever, leading MLA Diana Armstrong to fear that Ulster’s farming families will miss out.
The new English method is designed to make it easier for farmers to get into the tourism industry, smoothing the process of agricultural landowners doing anything from opening a farm shop or café to building cabins and lodges on their fields, creating a wellness retreat, or setting up a horse-riding school.
According to Ms Armstrong, families in Northern Ireland are often advised to diversify their businesses, only to smack into red tape from a provincewide planning system that “only allows new buildings in limited circumstances”.
Said the MLA: “I have lost count of the number of families in Fermanagh and South Tyrone who have told me about a good idea that went nowhere once it reached planning.
“In England planners are now being told to give real weight to diversification. Our farmers should have the same, and the same confidence that what they are proposing will be treated as an opportunity rather than a nuisance.”
Cash is also a problem, she stated, as an EU-funded scheme giving grants to cover the cost of diversifying Northern Ireland’s farms ended three years ago yet still hasn’t been replaced.
Meanwhile a fund set up by tourism business Airbnb to boost rural offerings only covers the Republic of Ireland, with businesses on this side of the border unable to access it.
“Fermanagh is marketed as part of Ireland’s hidden heartlands, alongside counties where groups can apply for that money while our own community groups and farm businesses are shut out of it,” said Ms Armstrong.
“I have written to Airbnb to ask whether they would look at extending that fund, or something like it, to Northern Ireland and the wider United Kingdom. Rural tourism does not stop at the border and neither should the support for it.
“But the bigger point is closer to home. We should not be relying on a private company to fill a gap our own government has left.”
The Fermanagh and South Tyrone MLA said tourists visit her constituency for the lakes, landscape and food. Farmers are eager to take advantage of that demand, she added, yet are too often hamstrung by planning laws they struggle to navigate.
“Farm shops, local produce, farm stays, food to go, I see the appetite for them every week,” she said.“Farmers here are not short of ideas. What they are short of is a system that lets them get on with it.”
Arguing that investment would pay off through repeat tourist visits, she said: “People come back because of the experience they had, not the advert they saw. That means roads, transport, visitor facilities and decent connectivity; the infrastructure has to match the marketing.”
She pledged to pressure several Stormont ministers whose briefs all contain elements of the issues at hand, including planning laws and rural investment levels.