DEFRA’s announcement that it will issue partial Single Farm Payments of 50% in February is a huge blow to the whole of the farming and rural community and will have further devastating consequences to all who make a living within it.

George Chichester, Farm Business Consultant, of Strutt & Parker says “The delays in payment of the 2005 Single Payment are estimated by the National Audit Office to have cost farmers between £18 and £22 million in additional interest payments and arrangement fees for that year alone, and a similar collective bill can be expected as a result of the continuing fiasco.”

Miliband has made it clear that the RPA will not be able to guarantee this year’s payments before next June. The RPA have targeted to have made only 96 per cent of payments by then – the EU imposed obligation. Given this unsatisfactory state of affairs, the RPA have conceded that they will make advance payments. Chichester says “the target should be an 80% advance payment, as with this year, and paid in December. That would be deemed acceptable, with the balance to follow once final checks had been completed,”

“Milliband talks of setting the 50 per cent level because ‘that’s what EU Regulations permit’. I say this to him: enough of playing by the EU rule book and paying out on the minimum you can get away with: other European farmers are receiving their full payment in December. Our farmers need 80% in December. Pay out 80%.

“Farmers continue to be let down by a wholly shambolic Government department whose levels of incompetence are astonishing”, he adds. The new announcement shows things are getting no better and that the RPA still has no confidence in its systems or ability to deliver.

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“Farmers just do not understand how the RPA can make such a simple task so complicated,” he points out. “In the past an arable farmer would have received his full IACS payment without any problems between mid November and late January. It worked pretty much like clockwork. Now though, there are massive problems and huge delays in payment – even though the fields were measured by

the Rural Land Register years ago; the historical claim base was known in 2003 and the total area of land claimed on in 2005 (with is relevant to the calculation of the Regional Average rate) was clear in early 2006.

“I don’t understand the problem. Farmers don’t understand it. And neither, it seems, do those in charge. It is not as if Government didn’t have the time to get their systems right. DEFRA have had three years to sort out the system, as the details of the Single Payment regime were announced in September 2003.

“Sadly, though, it is the farmer who pays for this incompetence. The EU penalty charge to the UK government for its maladministration of this new scheme – potentially of £130 million – is to be paid from the DEFRA budget and thus eventually by the rural community.”

Chichester concludes “It is farmers who are, in the extreme, brought to the brink of bankruptcy; who hover on the edge of despair over their cash flows and business prospects; and who are unable to plan ahead as they do not know when they will have the funds to meet business commitments. Meanwhile, RPA staff have received performance bonuses of £4.3 million in recognition of the wonderful job they are considered to have done, and the previous Secretary of State has been promoted to Foreign Minister.

At the end of the RPA’s incompetence trail are real people, with real lives. Lives which are being made more difficult and stressful by the day. “