THE "brick wall" hill farming lobbyists are up against in Europe was graphically described last week.

The frustration felt by Mr Peter Allen, chairman of the NFU's national less favoured area committee, was all too clear.

He said:

l the hill farm allowance scheme was a "mess";

l European officials were "people who thought they knew better";

l MAFF officials at one point had "run around like headless chickens";

l at one stage the scheme was beginning to go so wrong that he feared it would go down and take the NFU with it.

Mr Allen was addressing an NFU meeting on the new hill farm allowance scheme, held at Scotch Corner hotel on Thursday of last week.

He said that, during negotiations with the Ministry, it was apparent that the NFU was the only organisation actively lobbying in detail.

One particularly hard day in Brussels left him feeling deeply depressed.

"It was the hardest brick wall I have ever had to deal with," he said, "They just could not accept that different types of land needed farming differently; that you could not just have a blanket system."

The Commission would not move from its view that there had to be a switch from headage to area payments.

"It was a collection of people who thought they knew better," said Mr Allen, a hill farmer in Cumbria.

European officials had accused him of having "romantic" views about farming. "If they had been ignorant, you could have educated them but it was not that.

"We came back and MAFF ran around like headless chickens trying to devise a new scheme."

Another joint presentation by MAFF and the NFU was rejected.

"This scheme was beginning to go terribly wrong and I was afraid the NFU was going to go down with it," said Mr Allen.

Revised draftings were so numerous and frequent that the NFU had threatened to pull out of all discussions.

Finally the safety net was agreed which, Mr Allen said, provided a short breathing space, but it was imperative that the lobbying continued so the scheme could be turned round in the next two years.

"I don't mind saying this scheme is a mess; there are things in it that are hopelessly wrong but if we had gone into this mess without a safety net it would have been a disaster," he said.

MAFF intends to review the scheme in 2003 and Mr Allen said it was vital that hill farmers lobbied hard before then to have it reformed.

"We have a short time-scale but I can assure you we will do our best," he said.

"We will work as hard as we can to turn this round as soon as possible. If we do not, we will lose 75pc to 80pc of hill farmers very, very rapidly.