RPA pays 95% of single farm payments

The Rural Payments Agency has met its EU targets for single farm payments scheme nearly four months early – processing more than 95% of claims.

The agency has paid £1.651bn to 100,605 eligible farmers and food producers for the 2011 single farm payment scheme, figures released on Wednesday (7 March) showed.

This means that the agency had paid out 95.4% of the fund to 96% of eligible claimants. But 3,500 farmers are still waiting to be paid.

It means the RPA has met its second government performance indicator for the scheme three weeks ahead of schedule. In meeting the target, the agency has also passed the EU benchmark to pay over 95.238% of the scheme fund value by the end of June, nearly four months early. Last year the Agency met the EU benchmark in late May.

Chief Executive Mark Grimshaw said: “Thanks to the hard work of our people and their determination to provide the best customer service, we have made this volume of payments significantly earlier than has been achieved in any previous year while maintaining our focus on accuracy.

“Our attention now is clearly on those 3,500 or so farmers and food producers who have yet to be paid and we promise there will be no let-up on validating claims and making payments.

“We will be in touch with those claimants who look likely to remain unpaid at the end of March to explain the status on their claim, including any corrective work and payment adjustments related to previous scheme years.”

He added that the work on the legacy issues of their claims was vital if the agency were to provide the platform for better and faster customer service for 2012 scheme year and fulfil the ambitions of its recently announced five-year plan.

The RPA released this table called ‘Real actions, not words’ to show how it has performed against its goals:

Does the RPA’s performance confirm your experiences of the SFP this year? Comment on the forum on the RPA.

 

We said we would

We did

Improve communications with those who remain unpaid in the first weeks after opening of the payment window.
 

Personalised letters giving details of status plus, to aid business planning, an estimate of when the customer might expect to be paid.

Take action earlier on manually calculated payments.

Started two months earlier than last year making payments, on a case-by-case basis, to those with long-standing case specific issues making it unlikely they would otherwise be paid by end of June.

Tackle large and complex claims that are usually paid later in the payment window.

New complex case management approach lifted payments levels for this type of difficult to manage cases to 64% as at start of this year compared with 40% in 2010.

Pay 86 per cent of claimants and 81 per cent of the estimated value of total payments for SPS 2011 by 31st December.

We met the first of these indicators two weeks early, in mid-December. And by the end of December we had made payments amounting to £1.427 billion – that’s 82.5% of the estimated fund value – to 92,066 English farmers – some 87.8% of eligible claimants.  This represents the highest ever proportion of payments made by the Agency in the opening month of the payment window.

Shift the focus from driving just volume at the beginning of the payment window to cover value of money paid as well.

Met all new performance indicators for SPS 2011 reflecting value as well as volume of payments made.

Make manual payments to those not likely to be paid their SPS 2010 claims before the end of June 2011.

We did this in around 2300 cases where a system calculation and payment was not possible.

Ensure that less than one per cent of the monetary value of SPS 2010 payments remained outstanding at the regulatory benchmark at the end of June.

We did this by 17 June 2011.

 

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