To ask the Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development to outline the steps her Department has taken to provide greater access to support and services which will assist and encourage safe working on farms.

Since May 2012 my Department has been working as a Partner of the Farm Safety Partnership to improve safety on our farms. The Partnership also includes representatives from the Health and Safety Executive for NI, Ulster Farmers Union, Young Farmers Clubs of Ulster, National Farmers Union Mutual and NIAPA.

The Partnership launched its second Action Plan on 7 April 2014. This Action Plan will cover the years 2014 to 2017.

The aim of this action plan is to influence future behaviour so that farmers, their families, and their employees are capable, motivated, and able to work safely to reduce accidents on farms. A number of interventions are contained in the action plan to achieve this aim. The interventions will cover the four areas of Information and Promotion of SAFE Working, Training and Education, Motivating Good Behaviour and Discouraging Poor Practice, and Support and Assistance.

The Action Plan has 17 key actions including the following:

Develop with the assistance of farmers a suite of Visual Safety Guides demonstrating safe working methods,

Continue to Deliver and further develop a Farm Safety Awareness Programme,

Identify, develop and promote a suite of Accredited Farm Safety Training programmes,

To Develop and display a simple resource (Making it Safer) to allow farmers to risk assess their farms and identify simple solutions to manage risk,

Develop and deliver a Farm Safe Awareness Programme to farm Development Groups to encourage co-operation sharing and knowledge transfer between small groups of farmers,

Promoting safety through Grants by implementing a system to ensure that safety is a key cross cutting component of Rural Development Programme grants,

Develop and implement an Advice & Support Scheme to provide a suite of easily accessible advice and support services to assist farmers to properly manage health and safety.

A new web based Farm Safety tool called FarmSafeNet was launched recently by me. This was developed by the industry led Farm Safety Partnership. To date 323 businesses have successfully completed FarmSafeNet.

In addition my officials have been working closely with the HSENI to develop a Make it safer tool to be made available to all farmers. The aim of this tool is to provide farmers with an easy to use tool to help them identify the dangers on their farms and manage these ultimately leading to a safer environment in which they work.

My Department also intends to include Farm Safety as a feature of the new Business Improvement Scheme under the Rural Development programme.

As the partnership works through its action plan my Department will continue to support the actions taken to ensure that farmers have access to tools and material that will assist them in making their farms a safer place to work and live.