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Defra's Rural Payments Agency (RPA) policies threaten farm subsidy system

Defra's Rural Payments Agency (RPA) policies threaten farm subsidy system

The National Audit Office calls it a disgrace, and with a £622m wasted on bungled and the £1.6bn cost of farming subsidies to 107,000 English farmers (the figure does not include Scotland, Wales or N Ireland) the issue of farming subsidies is unlikely to brushed too quickly under the carpet of national conscience. Overpayments totalled a figure between £55m and £90m, but the data is so unreliable the auditors are unable to work out how much, and to whom. The average English payment was £15,300, and the largest over £2m. Many larger farms collected £180,000, and more.
If an MP's 88p bath plug can hold the headlines, the sums of money involved in the Single Farm Payment Scheme should be enough to keep the ire of hard working British taxpayers on the boil for some time.

What's gone so wrong?
The Rural Payments Agency (RPA) have the task of distributing cash to farmers, and it decided to develop a hugely complicated, but potentially quite fair system of doing this. Instead of saying to farmers "we'll base our payments on what you had before", the RPA decided to set up a system which took account of changes in the industry. Every year thousands of farmers change farming methods, retire, start up, enlarge and contract their acreage, and the payments system has to reflect this.
At the same time, there are many thousands of people with smallholdings, all who have an eligibility for farm payments, albeit for small and microscopic claims, and the RPA took the view that the small claimant was as needy as the barley baron.
The complications meant that the work was far more than anticipated. The systems for doing the work were equally complicated and highly unreliable. The RPA staff became disillusioned, and the work ethic was lost. Meanwhile the EU's imposed timetable was unattainable, deadlines were missed, and swinging fines imposed by the EU to punish this inefficiency.

Are things improving?
The RPA claim that their work is now on track, with fewer staff and greater efficiency. Administration costs per farmer claimant are still huge, and the Agency has embarked this year on another huge mapping exercise - updating the Rural Land register, a demand from Brussels which will cost many £millions and which repeats work done just in 2005. Why? because the Ordnance Survey has better mapping computers so there are Positional Accuracy Improvements, and they also feel the need to update Real World Change - the changes and movements on the ground. The RPA started the job in June 2009, and there has already been a problem with the first 17,000 maps in relation to National Grid references. There are 20,000 maps to go to farmers and claimants, and the exercise has to be completed by December so the new information can be used for next year's claims. If the work is delayed... yes, the RPA (or Her Majesty's Government, or you and me, the taxpayer) are fined again by the EU.
The RPA has a good line in reassurance, and this year, like previous ones, they are saying the job is on schedule.
The tightly written rules and the involvement of paid agents for farmers has not helped the situation. The RPA is concerned to have 'Ineligible Features' - things like roads, ponds and old buildings - that occupy ground space but are not subsidised identified. But farmers and their agents are anxious that if these features are declared they may then find themselves unable to claim subsidies under environmental programmes that are available for just these non-farming items - stewardship payments. The RPA assures farmers that as long as the features are on the Farm Environmental record they can still attract points under stewardship schemes.

Why might all this affect subsidy schemes?

Has the Financial Crisis of the past 24 months taken Britain to a cross roads, or will we continue as before? Will the pain and austerity that is to come be focussed on the 'hard working British people' through higher taxes, delayed pensions and reduced benefits? A system that largely leaves the uber-rich financially untouched, with their City jobs rescued, bonuses restored, their high-class entertainment subsidised through the Arts Council, their estates subsidised through the RPA and Defra, their off-shore savings and legacies protected against tax? Or will a new order emerge, where some of these enheadlinements are reduced?
And if this is the case, which might likely be first on the firing line? Maybe the ones to go will be those that are inefficient to administer. Or those which are in the public eye. Those that can benefit the seriously rich rather than just the well off.

How farming can protect itself

Image is the issue. If the Rt Hon Douglas Hogg QC could have explained that the money he claimed for his moat cleaning actually benefitted his partially sighted factotum by giving him a rewarding job and that the operation was done largely to secure the old codger employment the news might have been reported rather differently. (harder to find an excuse for the Harman Blues, her hubby's X-rated videos).
Farmers have a good line with the birds and bees, and organisations like FWAG (farming and Wildlife Advisory Group), English Nature, Farming and Countryside Education, the Game Conservancy Trust, Linking Farming and the Environment (LEAF), the Plunkett Foundation, the rare Breeds Survival trust, the Roslin Institute, RSPB, and the Wildlife Trusts Partnership Agency, together with long established agricultural societies such as Three Counties, Yorkshire, Bath & West and many others - all put forward the same case and message that associates farmers and farming with conservation and the natural world.

Or will a new order emerge?

Agriculture is clearly important. In years to come the UK population might well be glad that their farmers continue to produce food. The industry's efficiency can be helped by state funded programmes, which can both raise productivity and protect the environment, and these can be far less costly than the present SFP system. The 'Reward for being rich and having an inheritance', which is how the system was described recently can be changed, and is not written on tablets of stone. It's clearly up to real farmers who make a living from the soil to make certain they have a greater voice in the future.