No justification for further single payment scheme delay

The Tenant Farmers Association will be meeting this week with agriculture Minister, Jim Paice MP along with representatives of the NFU and CLA as thousands of farmers still await payment of their 2010 Single Payment Scheme claims.

TFA National Chairman, Jeremy Walker, said "The Government set itself a target of paying 95% of SPS claims by value by the end of March. It has already told us that this target will not be met. Most farmers will have used this target date to inform their budgeting and cash flow assessments prepared a year ago and those who have yet to receive their payment will now be in severe difficulty. We are at the traditional time of year for farm rents to be paid and it is not acceptable that once again many tenant farmers will have to ask their landlords for a period of grace due to the RPAs failure to administer the SPS system appropriately’.

At the last meeting with the Minister at the beginning of March, industry organisations stressed the imperative of making significant progress on paying the thousands of outstanding claimants awaiting their 2010 SPS payment and if it was not possible to do so through the RPA computer system, then there was no option other than to make partial payments on a manual basis.

’We are at the point now that unless the Minister can assure us that genuine progress can be made within a short period of time there is no option but to order that manual and if necessary partial payments to outstanding claimants should be made without further delay. The Government needs to grasp the nettle and do what is necessary to help those hard-pressed farmers in major financial difficulty. We understand that this will not be without difficulty for the Government but the difficulty being experienced in farmhouses up and down the country is intensely more acute," said Walker.

"Where it not for Farm Crisis Network whose volunteers have been doing a fantastic job in assisting individuals who are in real financial and other difficulties to obtain at least some payment, the situation would be a whole lot worse. However, when RPA staff advise claimants for whom they are responsible to bypass RPA and instead use FCN to unlock outstanding payments, it shows that the operating systems of the RPA must be in chaos", said Mr Walker.