The Natural England chief operating officer Guy Thompson has been scrutinised by MPs over Countryside Stewardship performance.
Mr Thompson has admitted to the group of MPs he does not expect the issues with Countryside Stewardship to be cleared until next year.
The Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee criticised Mr Thompson over the delays to agri-environment payments, of which 86 per cent have been issued.
Natural England is believed to have received approximately 4,700 Countryside Stewardship applications during 2016 for agreements due to start at the beginning of January 2017.
But farmers are complaining, more than two months later, to hear whether their applications have been successful or not.
'Not good enough'
Committee chairman Neil Parish said at the hearing: “It is not good enough. If you were in the private sector and you were doing business with somebody and a year later you were still working out the rules, they would go somewhere else.
“I know you’re not in business. But why does it take so long when you change a system to get it right? We have been through this with the Basic Farm Payment and now we are in just such a mess with this stewardship scheme.”
The delays have been blame on a variety of reasons; on the need to gather vast amounts of evidence from applicants, complexity of EU rules, difficulties with the IT system which is shared with the Rural Payments Agency and the need to prioritise BPS payments.
'Suck it and see'
The National Farmers Union said it was pleased MPs were dealing with the problems experienced by Natural England in terms of Countryside Stewardship delivery.
NFU vice-president Guy Smith said: “Too often we are hearing Natural England using euphemistic terms such as ‘real-time management’ and ‘agile build’ when it comes to their approach.
“As farmers, we call that ‘suck it and see’ or ‘doing it by the seat of the pants’. This is not satisfactory and we want to see Natural England more on top of this very soon.”
