Rural welcome for shake-up at farm cash body

FARMING leaders have given a warm welcome to the latest damning report into the troubled Rural Payments Agency (RPA), calling for the mess surrounding subsidy payments to farmers to be resolved once and for all.

After five years of well-documented troubles and blunders it has been announced the RPA will be given a radical overhaul, with the management team to be replaced and the cost of processing claims to be

dramatically reduced.

The move follows yet another highly critical review, this time carried out for its parent department Defra (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs), with the country's agricultural industries united in their hope that this time around lessons will be learned and changes would be made to make sure mistakes of the past five years are not repeated.

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President of the Country Land and Business Association and Yorkshire landowner William Worsley said the report echoed what he and his organisation had been saying for some time.

"I have been meeting with ministers on this matter for four and half years," he said. "It would be churlish to say there have been no improvements but I can say that the improvements have not been good enough and this issue really wants to be sorted. Part of the problem is that areas of management have not been honest about what is going on."

He welcomed the news that farming Minister Jim Paice would be heading the changes and said the decision not to follow the recommendation to rebrand the agency was a wise one.

"Rebranding is not going to stop the problem – it is much deeper than that. It is much better to try and deal with it than fudge it with a new name."

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Mr Worsley added that he had advised Mr Paice to appoint a "top quality" chief executive to help drive the changes forward.

"Jim is not going to be able to do this himself. We need someone who will grasp the metal and bring in a strong management team to take this organisation forward."

The National Farmers' Union welcomed the news a minister would have greater overall power at the RPA and said the task ahead would be far from easy.

President Peter Kendall said: "The NFU hopes that its publication and the Government response marks the beginning of getting the RPA to a place where it can hold its head high as an effective and cost-efficient organisation.

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"Absolutely crucial to this, however, is Defra taking responsibility for the agency and ensuring that an effective action plan is drawn up and, more importantly, kept to. Experience over the last six years tells me it is a tall order, but Defra and the RPA must get to the bottom of issues affecting wrong claims and incorrect data."

Chris Windle, of farm advisers Windle Beech Winthrop at Skipton, has been actively involved in helping scores of Yorkshire farmers who have had their claims miscalculated.

He said he agreed entirely with the report's criticism of managers.

"You cannot blame people doing the processing in Northallerton and places like that. They are working as hard as they can, it is the management above them and the systems they have to work with. Management seem to view things through rose-tinted spectacles."

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One farmer to have felt the pain of RPA incompetence is Ian Wellock, a dairy farmer from Kirby Malham near Skipton, who is owed 14,000 by the RPA after it miscalculated his claim two years in a row.

He is trying to invest in and expand his farm and said that the delay in payments is causing him problems. "The bank has been good with us but we have been told the earliest it could be for us to get our money is October. It is just so frustrating."

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