Big Brother or Oh Brother! by Michael Bax

It was interesting to note the 18 December Farmers Weekly’s report on the findings of MP’s on the Public Accounts Committee in their consideration of the activities of the Rural Payments Agency. £680M of taxpayers’ money appears to have been wasted and the committee charges the RPA with paying negligible attention to taxpayers’ interests.

From this firm’s perspective, it looks as though the 2009 Single Farm Payments are coming out quite well but the mapping debacle was scandalous and is likely to hold up a number of those looking to enter or reapply for ELS over the next couple of months.

At the end of the day words from the Government are cheap. Nothing ever seems to stick on that side of the fence and yet individual farmers suffer highly stressful investigation over what are often very minor issues. We can only hope that the RPA end up with a core of experienced staff, with whom there can be sensible discussion rather than inexperienced operatives who have no choice but to hide behind their big stick in order to conceal their shortcomings in terms of knowledge and experience.