14 Feb – Definitive entitlement day at the RPA

The day has arrived when the Rural Payments Agency should be in a position to definitively establish entitlements for farmers in England.

DEFRA announced at the end of January that it expected the RPA to make the entitlement calculations on Feb 14.

Assuming everything goes to plan, farmers will be informed of their individual details within two weeks.

An RPA spokesman told FARMERS WEEKLY that a computer run to calculate definitive entitlements would start on Tues evening and continue until Wednesday morning (15 Feb).

“We will know in the morning whether it has succeeded or if there have been any computer problems. But if it goes as planned letters will be printed off and start going out from 20 Feb-28 Feb and payments should follow swiftly.”

The spokesman stressed that while it might take until Feb 28 to get all the entitlement letters out to farmers, payments should commence before then, as payments can start before all the letters are sent out.

Farmers have already been warned that they need to check their entitlement letters carefully to see if they have validated or unvalidated entitlements.

It has emerged that up to 60,000 producers could be allocated unvalidated entitlements because the RPA has not managed to finish processing all the applications.

Producers with unvalidated entitlements will find themselves further down the payment queue, because they cannot be paid until validation has been completed.