Britain facing £190m bill over farm payments

The European Commission said it had worked out that the UK owed it 190m – or 223 million euros – in repayments of grant money which had been distributed incompetently and fines for the time and trouble the investigation had taken.

Some of the money had already been repaid, but there was still 144m – or 251 million euros – to come.

Last night, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) said the bill was expected and the money for the English portion of it, 161m, had been set aside some time ago.

There was no question of it becoming an additional saving to make from the Budget for the future, it added.

But 28.4m of the total UK bill applies to Northern Ireland and its government's Press officers were unable to say last night if they had the money set aside.

Most of the money is owed for errors by the Rural Payments Agency (RPA), which was set up to administer the complex transition from a range of old farm support payments to a single one – in most cases – and has been under criticism ever since.

For the past year, the RPA has been struggling to get through a rushed update of its digital map of all the farmed land in the country.

That exercise was made necessary by the auditors' criticisms of its control of spending in 2005, 2006 and 2007.

This week, RPA chief executive Tony Cooper, who took over in mid-2006, announced he would take early retirement "for personal reasons".

Although the agency improved under his management, it was still savaged in a report by the National Audit Office last year.

The new agricultural affairs Minister, James Paice, made clear before he was elected that a full review of the RPA would be one of his priorities.

Last night, Mr Paice said: "The Commission has now drawn a line under the legacy of the long-running and expensive saga of implementing the Single Payment Scheme in 2005.

"Today's announcement will have no impact on the services we deliver, as the sums have already been accounted.

"But we recognise that more needs to be done to improve the administration of the scheme. I'll be making an announcement about this, and the RPA review, shortly."

Past reports of the RPA's mistakes have concentrated on late payments and underpayments to farmers. But the European auditors were critical of much more.

A background briefing on the figures published yesterday makes clear that the RPA's principle offence was handing out a lot of taxpayers' money with inadequate checks on who was entitled to it.

The auditors said there is strong evidence that some farmers were deliberately and repeatedly over-claiming. It might have helped discourage cheating if there had ever been a prosecution for it, but there never had been.

Last night, a DEFRA spokeswoman said: "We take fraud very seriously and would always look to prosecute where there was evidence.

"However, in most of these cases we believe the problem was genuine misunderstanding of the rules."

Show attendance figures rise again

Attendance at the Great Yorkshire Show this week was 131,582, over the three days – up for the fourth year running.

The record stands at 135,111 in 2006 and last year's figure was 130,731.

Bill Cowling, show director for the Yorkshire Agricultural Society, said: "It has been one of the finest I can remember. We're already looking forward to our autumn event, Countryside Live."

At the end of proceedings, the outgoing president of the Yorkshire Agricultural Society, deer farmer Richard Elmhirst, formally handed over the staff of office to his successor, supermarket tycoon Sir Ken Morrison.

Countryside Live is scheduled for Saturday and Sunday October 23-24.

The Yorkshire Post coverage of this week's show can be accessed at www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/gys