RPA bungles cattle claims

BRITISH TAXPAYERS will have to foot a €10.5m (£7.14m) bill because of misspent CAP support, the EU Commission has decided.

The commission’s regular clearance of accounts procedure identified over £7m worth of problematic livestock payments made by the Rural Payments Agency last year.

It blamed failures in on-site checking to verify claims and weaknesses in the registration and identification of animals.

A spokesman for the RPA said the problem was “straggling late payments last June”.

The money constituted a tiny part of the UK’s annual agriculture budget of £2.7bn, he added.

Agriculture and rural development commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel said: “European taxpayers’ money has to be properly spent.

“As the decision shows, the commission is not prepared to compromise on this issue and will continue to take a tough stance to stamp out malpractice and lax controls.

“We will not hesitate to recover misspent money from member states.”

However, the UK’s corrections represent a fraction of the total €277m (£188m) that is to be recovered from all the member states together.

As usual, the Mediterranean member states topped the list of repayments.

Spain has to return €134m (£91m) for fraud and mismanagement in its flax and hemp support scheme.

Italy also racked up repayments of €68m (£47m) for over-paying its olive growers between 1998 and 2000, while Greece will be have to return €25m (£17m) for irregular arable payments.

Conservative agriculture spokesman in the European Parliament, Neil Parrish commended the commission for clamping down on fraud and corruption in the CAP.

But he added: “British taxpayers will rightly question whether their money is being spent effectively across Europe, following this news that such a vast sum of EU subsidy has to be returned.”