Louise Haigh – 2015 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Louise Haigh on 2015-12-10.

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what estimate she has made of the cost of disallowance penalties relating to the Common Agricultural Policy as a result of the return to paper-assisted digital applications in 2015.

George Eustice

The new Common Agricultural Policy has been widely recognised as being more complex for farmers to understand and harder for Member States to administer. The new schemes have not yet been audited by the European Commission so it is too early to say what the level of any disallowance will be, but complexity tends to increase disallowance risk.

For the Basic Payment Scheme 2015 the Rural Payments Agency (RPA) sent pre-populated claim forms to farmers and land owners to allow them to submit their applications before the deadline. The RPA provided an unprecedented level of support to farmers and land owners through the Rural Payments Helpline and 50 Drop In Centres that allowed some 88,000 applications to be received within the deadline. ‘Paper-assisted’ means that forms were completed on paper but then entered on to a digital system by RPA staff.