The NFU has expressed anger over what it calls the Rural Payments Agency’s ‘mapping fiasco’.
Calls for action were laid at the feet of RPA chief operations officer Steve Pearce at a NFU Council meeting on Tuesday (21 April).
NFU members spoke of their frustrations at the ‘manmade bureaucratic incompetence’ that has seen members left without any maps, inaccurate mapping, incomplete paperwork or tied in knots trying to get through the labyrinth RPA call centre.
The RPA admitted that 33,000 farmers and growers still had some missing data on their application sheets but reassured NFU Council that it would contact each individually to fill in the gaps or add data where it could.
During the meeting NFU President Peter Kendall asked for a show of hands to demonstrate the enormity of the problem, caused by the RPA re-mapping all farms across England, ahead of the SPS 2010 applications
He called the dozens of people with issues in the room “a barometer for the industry and the problems that are out there”.
“What we need to know now is how the RPA plans to mitigate against the scores of problems that members have raised with the NFU,” he said.
“I am absolutely amazed that despite warning the RPA of the problems we anticipated with mapping way back in the summer last year that we are where we are today.
“I want assurances from the RPA that farmers won’t be penalised for mistakes that are not of their doing, that payments will be issued in full and on time, and that they have a contingency plan in place to avoid the car crash that is heading our way.”
An RPA spokeswoman acknowledged some information was missing on application forms.
It was not always possible to link 2009 claim data with new fields where fields had changed significantly because of the agency's mapping update, she added.
"This isn’t new ‘news’. It’s something we’ve known about and shared with the industry from 2009 onwards and we’ve taken action to help farmers avoid making mistakes because of it."
The RPA had issued guidance in the SPS 2010 handbook to help farmers, she said.
Further help included writing to every farmer with a blank in their data, achecklist on the RPA website and guidance in advertisements.
"We are directing farmers to the drop-in centres where we check to see that each line is completed. We have directed farmers to use SPS Online which includes prompts to ensure these blanks are completed.
"It’s also worth noting that we’ve analysed forms and some of them may only have one item of information missing for one parcel."