Natural England has issued the following advice for farmers in stewardship who have outstanding RLR mapping issues with the RPA:
• Firstly, contact Natural England and ask them to prompt the RPA via their priority list to deal with the case more quickly. The NFU has asked the RPA and NE to work together better on mapping issues and this has resulted in the exchange of a such a list of cases between the organisations.
• If only one or two fields are affected and farmers are struggling to get a stewardship application in to minimise a payment gap (for example if they have an ELS agreement which expires on 31 July), another option is to submit the application without the ‘problem’ fields. These can then be added in via an amendment once the issue with RPA is sorted out. Farmers may even find that they can include missing fields, because Natural England may have them in Genesis even though they may not be linked to the correct farmer.
• There is also no difficulty in terms of renewing an agreement if the query with the RLR is on ineligible features within the field boundary. Natural England takes the whole field size, not the area without the ineligible features. The ineligible features ‘layer’ of the RLR mapping is solely for the purpose of SPS claim eligibility.
Get more news on agri-environment schemes from the NFU here.
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