DEFRA CHAOS
DEFRA announced on 14 July that the RPA will now prioritise registration of land on to the Rural Land Register to ensure the fastest possible progress towards a February 2006 start date for payments under the Single Payment Scheme. This is likely to affect 120,000 customers.
 | Up until the 15 July, those customers who had notified the RPA that they were intending to apply for the Environmental Stewardship Entry Level Scheme were given priority over others in the Land Registration queue. Some 7,000 applicants with outstanding land registrations have been prioritised in this way. However, from 15 July no new cases will be added to this current priority list. |
The next two application deadlines for the Higher Level Environmental Stewardship Scheme have also been extended by one month each and will now close on 31 August and 30 October.
The closure of the prioritisation for the Entry Level Scheme may mean that a number of farmers may have to wait a number of months before their land registration has been completed. |
Andrew Ranson of Fisher German’s Banbury office comments ‘It would appear that DEFRA and the RPA have completely underestimated the amount of work involved with the land registration process. They apparently currently have a backlog of 32,000 IACS22 forms and are processing about 1,000 per week. Many of our clients find it completely unacceptable that the RPA can hold them up from applying to a European approved scheme by perhaps six to twelve months because of this. I very much doubt whether there would have been any allowable excuses for late Single Payment Scheme applications if the applicants had been busy.’
Andrew continues ‘We understand that the RPA have a huge task ahead of them, but it is obvious that despite years of warning, inappropriate planning of how they were going to cope with this task has meant that they have been on the back foot from day one. In addition to many farmers being delayed in making their Entry Level Scheme applications, the RPA will really have their work cut out if they will be ready to make their payment targets by next spring.”
“As an example of some of the chaos, we heard last week from one of our clients that the RPA had no record of receiving a Single Payment Scheme application from them, yet we had received an acknowledgement from the RPA that they had received this. You can imagine how worrying this sort of thing can be for applicants. Other clients are still receiving their SP5 acknowledgment post cards back more than 2 months after their forms were received!’
- Ashby de la Zouch
- 01530 412821
- Banbury
- 01295 271 555
- Knutsford
- 01565 757970
- Market Harborough
- 01858 410 200
- Newark
- 01949 851815
- Southampton
- 02380 883150
- St Helens
- 01744 451145
- Stafford
- 01785 220 044
- Worcester
- 01905 453275
