“By now, the RPA should be confident of meeting the 30 June deadline every year without fail, and no farmer should still be waiting for the 2005 payment. The RPA needs to get its house in order. Only then can the Agency begin the mammoth task of regaining farmers’ trust”.

Mr Bacon was speaking as the National Audit Office published its report on resolving the difficulties in administering the Single Payment Scheme in England today.  The report finds that, until the Rural Payments Agency (RPA) is able to meet the 30 June deadline each year and is confident that it can process payments within an acceptable margin of error, farmers will not have complete confidence in the RPA’s administration of the scheme.  There is also a risk of penalties being imposed by the European Commission. 

Although the Rural Payments Agency has reviewed cases where entitlements used for the first year of the scheme in 2005 may be incorrect, in the interim the errors in the first year of the scheme would have been largely repeated in the second year (the 2006 scheme).  The Agency has also not yet paid all those claimants who were underpaid in the first year, nor recovered the sums from those farmers who were overpaid. As a consequence, the Agency was not able to administer the 2006 single payment scheme in a fully cost-effective manner.

12 December 2007

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See also:
NAO REPORT: Administering the Single Payment Scheme
PARLIAMENT: Rural Payments Agency 'failed farmers' says MP

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