Basic Payment Scheme applications

With less than two weeks to go before the submission deadline for this year’s Basic Payment Scheme applications, it is astonishing that 10 per cent of last year’s applicants have yet to receive any money for last year’s claim. 

As a result the RPA chief executive Mark Grimshaw announced at the last NFU Council meeting that bridging payments will be made to those who have received no money at all.

Mr Grimshaw explained that the final applications from last year were proving more difficult to process than had been anticipated because of the complications caused by a new inspection regime and changes to how commons applications are processed.

This may be true but what worries me is not just the 10 per cent who have received no payment, it is also the huge number of errors that have come to for those who have received payments.  From my experience of completing such forms about 25 per cent of applicants I have dealt with are experiencing issues of one sort or another.

These vary from inexplicable underpayments or fines for errors which do not seem to exist, the loss of entitlements, missing land on the online maps or the inclusion of land which is not part of the farmer’s holding.  Also, in some cases field boundary changes which were made last year have still to be processed which makes it very difficult to deal with this year’s application.

For example if the land changes from last year have not been mapped what should an applicant put on this year’s forms?  This is just one of the many practical issues causing farmers and their agents a real headache and yet there seems no way of sorting out even the simplest of problems in a timely manner. 

The current advice is to email the RPA with your query and then you receive an email by return which says: “Thank you for contacting the Rural Payments Agency. If we need to get back to you, we'll reply within 10 working days.”   

Sadly I have rarely received a reply from the RPA within 10 days. Clearly they do not think they “need” to reply but I can assure them that they do.  If they do not address these queries very soon, the errors from last year’s claims will be compounded into the 2016 applications which will make unravelling these problems even more difficult.

Unfortunately this does bring back memories of the fiasco that occurred in 2005 when the BPS’ predecessor subsidy system was introduced, the fallout from which was both costly in terms of EU fines being imposed on the government and hardship to farmers.  I just hope this will be a relatively minor fiasco in comparison.

James Stephen MRICS FAAV
Partner
Rural Practice Chartered Surveyor, Wells
T: 01749 683381
E: james.stephen@carterjonas.co.uk