Farmers count the cost – again

SO far, the election debate has concentrated on the veracity of each party's proposed spending cuts. It has not focused on the related, and equally important, need for better government.

Yet this is precisely what Britain needs when one considers the Rural Payments Agency's lamentable record since its inception – and how farm subsidy payments threaten to be delayed, once again, because officials have so little affinity with the agricultural industry and how farmers work.

It would not have come to this if Defra had accepted the considered observations in the first place. Yet, while politicians on the election train promise to listen more to all and sundry, a test of their credentials will be whether they listen to farmers in this instance – and how they go about reforming the RPA.

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Even though top officials are receiving bonuses, the problems remain. And years of delays to the prompt payment of subsidies – the Agency has repeatedly found itself playing catch up – are now compounded by inaccuracies in the mapping of farms on the organisation's computer database.

The resulting chaos – which centres around the inaccurate

identification of farm boundaries, in part because they are not clear from the air – means 1,500 application forms have not even been sent out, even though the deadline for their completion is three weeks away.

The biggest regret is that this was all eminently predictable, despite the measures that have been put in place by Environment Secretary Hilary Benn to speed up payments. Indeed, the ongoing problems are surmised by farming leaders, in their letter to the RPA, in which they

state that these problems "arise from the lack of real understanding, especially among IT consultants, about the practicalities of farming and how they impinge on claiming the Single Farm Payment".

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Given the proximity of the latest deadline, and the inevitable upheaval after the general election, the best option might be for officials to ask the EU to extend the timeframe by three months to try and avoid the chaos of the past being repeated once again. That has to be the short-term priority.

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