Give HFA losers extra time to submit appeals
Give HFA losers extra time to submit appeals
By John Burns South-west correspondent
PRODUCERS who have failed to qualify for Hill Farming Allowance scheme payments need more time and more infor-mation to make appeals, NFU president Ben Gill has told the government.
Over 3400 producers whose holdings had both LFA and lowland areas received a letter in January telling them they were unlikely to qualify for the HFA scheme (News, Feb 2) which replaces the Hill Livestock Compensatory Allowance.
MAFF imposed a deadline for appeals which past yesterday (Thurs) and Mr Gill is concerned that many producers are still confused by the scheme and could miss out on payments.
In a letter to farm minister Nick Brown, Mr Gill said that MAFF should not underestimate the confusion caused by the HFA scheme.
"MAFF must revise its timetable and immediately notify all producers who have received these letters that further calculations will be needed," he said.
South-west NFU livestock adviser Peter Morris echoed Mr Gills concern, saying that many of the initial MAFF letters may not yet have been opened or that producer enquiries had been met with MAFF staff insistence that the computer calculation was right.
One such case reported was Peter Roberts, who farms the well-stocked Blable Farm, St Issy, Cornwall. He was told by MAFF that his LFA stocking rate was only 0.07LUs/ha, well below the minimum 0.15 required to qualify for HFA.
Despite repeated appeals to MAFF that the figures were wrong, ministry staff continued to insist the figures must be right because the computer produced them. But by further persistence and with NFU help, MAFF was eventually persuaded to investigate his figures.
Mr Roberts understood MAFF had initially mistakenly included track and quarry in his lowland forage area and when it was removed he just scraped past the 0.15LU/ha minimum stocking on his LFA land.
It appears that a MAFF error over less than 2 acres (0.78ha) of roadways and an old quarry was the reason Mr Roberts almost lost his entire HFA payments on the 47ha of LFA land on his 195.91ha farm. *