He writes:
So at last the RPA had laid down some targets we could all understand.
No more ambiguous language along the lines ‘vast majority’ or ‘almost all’. They wrote to many claimants telling them they would be paid between 14th and 31st March and furthermore they told the EFRA committee they would pay at least 92% of all claimants by April Fools day, including some 3,500 commons claims as the IT was there to deliver the payments.
Having allowed an additional four days for payments to clear through the banking process it is now clear to us that these promises have not been kept. The RPA can no longer suggest things are going according to plan.
The lack of progress in getting the last 10,000 payments out is turning into a weekly saga of the RPA failing to deliver against their promises. Something is clearly awry and our guess is it is because the IT won’t release payments in the way it is meant to. But we are fed up with guessing and we need to hear this direct from the RPA or their political masters in Defra.
If it is the IT that repeatedly won’t work then they need to urgently get part payments out to the 10,000 still waiting. As one of those patient 10,000 still unpaid I can well understand how, after 18 weeks of waiting since the opening of the payment window on December 31st, patience has now run out. We are owed a proper explanation.
Paid at start of December - 33,376
Paid 2nd to 31st December - 11,024
Paid in January - 22,400
Paid in February - 4,900
Paid in March - >3000 (less than)
That’s 74,700 paid out of a 87,000 claimant population. Allowing the possibility 2,000 of these might, for various reasons, not be paid then the percentage paid is 87%.
Meanwhile as one door struggles to properly close another struggles to properly open. Given the rushed and shaky way the first year of BPS was implemented with the ‘Plan B’ of handwritten forms having to be quickly transcribed by RPA staff, many of them drafted in at the last-minute, it was inevitable that errors would occur.
Indeed that is what we are now hearing with hundreds of members telling us they have been significantly underpaid for BPS 2015 and/or 2016 data being incorrect. As we speak we are now undertaking extensive survey work to assess how widespread this is and what the exact nature is. The survey will be complete by next week when we will report on its findings and make our representations to government accordingly.
Meanwhile the NFU keeps the pressure on...
- We are the lead organisation when it comes to breaking stories with the press about the latest BPS situation.
- We are the only organisation with a team who can survey an extensive membership to get the best picture available of what is happening on the ground at farm level.
- Our staff and call centre are second to none when it comes to up to date technical advice on BPS for our members and actively lobby the RPA and Defra on BPS and related matters.
- We regularly update politicians on the situation so they can help hold government to account on the efficient administration of BPS.
- We regularly take our concerns to the top of government about this issue.