18 May 2011
Agriculture minister Jim Paice today admitted that the Rural Payments Agency (RPA) has been forced to process farmers’ subsidy payments manually in order to meet European deadlines.
The minister said that, as a result, the RPA was now on course to meet the EU benchmark for payments and would escape paying further penalties.
Further reading
The total value of payments made to farmers had hit £1.63bn by 13 May.
Paice said earlier this year that the RPA wanted to avoid processing payments manually to reduce the chance of errors.
But despite scores of fixes being made to the payments system, the RPA has caved in to the pressure to validate some payments manually.
“The introduction of those measures, including making manually validated payments in some circumstances, ensured that RPA exceeded its revised payment profile in April,” Paice told Parliament.
According to the National Audit Office, the RPA has run up £680m in unseen costs on top of the £350m it paid for the IT systems.
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