THEY MAY be the most senior civil servants in Europe, but most EU commissioners come to the job with sound political credentials.

When it comes to a background honed in politics, they do not come better than the farm commissioner, Phil Hogan. Years of deal-making between Irish political parties is clear when he is in discussions with MEPs. He has the art of delivering what people want to hear, and that was the case this week when, in front of the agriculture committee of the European parliament, he returned to a subject where there is a lot of mutual agreement - the need to simplify the complexities of the CAP.

Ironically, Hogan's touch in dealing with politicians, from MEPs and national farm ministers to his opposite number in the United States and other administrations, is exactly what his predecessor, Dacian Ciolos, lacked. He was a competent agriculturalist, but had little political experience, having come to the job as a top civil servant in Romania.

He was good at theory, but Hogan is happy to leave that to his advisers, and to instead concentrate on getting the political support needed to get his ideas through. He has done this since he started in the job, and it reflects his background in Ireland, where deal-making is an art all politicians need to understand.

His comments this week were about penalties for over-declaring land areas, which in almost all cases is accidental or down to poor understanding of rules. This was about reducing the scale of penalties, but his really radical, and interesting, suggestion, is that a system of yellow cards could be introduced.

This is not about farmers being sent to the 'sin bin' for a period of time or facing restitutions for future games, but is a common sense way to reduce penalties by half as a warning. Farmers would then face an unannounced inspection the following year to make sure they have learned the lesson and are abiding by the rules. This really is common sense in action. It has the potential to alter farmers' perception of the CAP from being something out to catch them, to what it should be - a mechanism to help agriculture survive.

Add to this the recent decision by Hogan to give farmers a 35 days grace period to alter their single payment application and it is clear that he is out to change the CAP.

It is a pity this level of common sense was not around earlier about land parcel problems. This would have left member states hundreds of millions of pounds better off, since they might have avoided penalties that were largely unfair and triggered by errors rather than attempts to cheat the system. He has also promised changes to some of the agricultural market regulations, and more importantly for farmers changes to greening.

The disappointment is that these greening plans will be published later this year for implementation in 2017, which raises the danger of them ending up too little too late. When these emerge they could be disappointing. Farmers need to be ready to tell Hogan and the Commission that there is a strong case for using the 2017 mid-term review of the CAP to look not at the detail of greening but at the core regulation. This was agreed by ministers, MEPs and the Commission, and can only be changed by agreement between all three.

Greening has failed farmers and the environment so badly that it is not going to be fixed by tweaking the regulation. What is needed is root and branch change to improve the policy and leave it capable of being part of the next CAP reform after 2020.

If anyone doubts whether Hogan is committed to simplification, his comments to MEPs suggest he really does want to see this happen. He said that 'everywhere he went' he heard from farmers about the problems they were facing with CAP red tape. He said that while he recognised the need for the CAP to be implemented in a way that protected taxpayers' funds going into it - and it still accounts for close to 40% of all EU spending - it was equally important that farmers could farm without an 'excessively onerous burden' that threatened their payments.

If that is not a commitment to deliver, it is difficult to imagine what would be - and Hogan can now be judged against these promises.