Name change for '˜degrading' farm support fund

A hardship fund to help farmers overcome serious cashflow problems caused by delayed support payments will be renamed to encourage applicants, the Government has announced.
Labour's Don Valley MP Caroline Flint was influential in securing the hardship fund's name change.Labour's Don Valley MP Caroline Flint was influential in securing the hardship fund's name change.
Labour's Don Valley MP Caroline Flint was influential in securing the hardship fund's name change.

Launched to ease the burden on farmers left financially-stricken by the Rural Payments Agency’s troubled handling of administering £1.39bn in lifeline European subsidy payments, more than £8m has been paid out to over 500 farmers since the Basic Payment Scheme hardship fund opened earlier this year.

But the fund’s name was labelled “degrading” by Yorkshire MP Caroline Flint at a recent hearing of the all-parliamentary Public Accounts Committee, as she criticised take up of the emergency funding for being too low.

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Now, just a fortnight on from the Don Valley MP’s call for the name to be changed, the Committee announced that her wish had been granted.

A statement issued by the Committee read: “Following consultation the Government has now agreed to rename the fund BPS Financial Support Payments.”

Mrs Flint said: “I don’t know if this is record for a Government department acting on a suggestion from a session of the Public Accounts Committee but I am pleased that action has been taken.

“Expecting farmers to apply to something called a ‘hardship fund’ is degrading and may be a reason why take up is so low. I welcome the name change and hope the same urgency and focus will be applied to sorting out the other problems with the delivery of rural payments.”

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At the earlier committee hearing, Mrs Flint asked Clare Moriarty, the permanent secretary of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) what her department was trying to do to address low take-up of a fund which offered to pay out 50 per cent of the value of delay-hit farmers’ payment claims.

She said some farmers might feel embarrassed or may be too proud about applying to the fund because of its name.

She said: “You can understand, can’t you? Basically, people should be paid the payment - it is their right to get it - but then they are almost being asked to put out the begging bowl.

“It is a crying shame if there are resources there, but people are not taking advantage of that for different reasons - pride or whatever. Can you go and look at that and write to us about how you are going to address that?”

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Ms Moriarty said the fund, which has been available to farmers through a group of farming charities, was set up and named with “absolutely the right intentions” for people who needed help to meet their outgoings, and she vowed to “look into” whether the name was off-putting to potential applicants.

The emergency fund was set up because of IT failures at the Rural Payments Agency which led to an online-only approach to 2015 BPS applications being abandoned in what was the first year of the European Union’s new iteration of its direct payments, the Basic Payment Scheme.

Even now some farmers still await correct full payments.

The 2016 payment window opens a fortnight today - on December 1. Rural Payments Agency chief executive Mark Grimshaw has promised that lessons have been learned and that 90 per cent of all farmers will be paid their BPS monies by the end of the year, followed by a further three per cent by the end of March.