Farmers still waiting for 2005 single farm payment corrections
Some of the farmers who were underpaid a total of £19m on their 2005 single farm payments are still waiting to have their payments corrected, according to a government watchdog.
The National Audit Office has also warned that the Rural Payments Agency is yet to commence recovery of up to £6.8m in overpayments for the 2005 scheme year. At least six farmers involved in this were overpaid by more than £100,000 each.
In a report published on Wednesday (12 Dec), the NAO said that the RPA had made good progress in recent months in getting problems with administering the Single Payment Scheme sorted.
The agency managed to process 98% by value of payments for the 2006 scheme by the EU deadline of June 2007.
“However, the agency has not yet made up all the difference to all those claimants who were paid too little in the first year, nor recovered the sums from those farmers who were paid too much,” it said.
It added: “Farmers in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, like those in Finland and Germany, continue to receive their payments earlier than farmers in England.”
The NAO report said the RPA had undertaken a substantial exercise to identify overpayment and underpayments for the 2005 scheme.
Some 34,500 cases were identified as “at risk” and many of the errors made in 2005 were likely to have been repeated in 2006.
Head of the National Audit Office Sir John Bourn said: “Since my report over a year ago on the implementation of the Single Payment Scheme, the RPA has made encouraging progress in remedying the problems I highlighted, as demonstrated by an increase in farmers’ satisfaction with the handling of their claims.
“But, until the agency is in the position consistently to meet the June deadline each year and can process payments within an acceptable tolerance of error, the risk is that farmers’ confidence in the scheme will wane and the European Commission will levy financial penalties.”
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