A further test to monitor the effectiveness of the systems will take place soon, and the Rural Payments Agency (RPA) is aiming to begin making full payments in earnest ‘within the next few weeks’.

The delivery of the first payments this week, albeit as part of a small scale test, puts the agency over a month ahead of last year, when the first payments were made on February 20. This is because the first claims were definitively established in early January, compared with mid-February last year.

The agency says it is also on course to deliver part payments, worth at least 50 per cent, from mid-February to farmers who have not received full payments by then.

The part payments process should take three weeks, so by early March the vast majority of the 110,000 claimants in England should have received some money.

NFU policy director Martin Haworth said ‘all the evidence’ pointed to the RPA being on course to meet its targets, but he told the NFU council that some areas of concern remained.

The biggest is over the 7,700 Fruit, Vegetable and Potato (FVP) allocations. Over Christmas, the RPA announced that, following a review, it was finally able to inform growers of their revised allocations.

Source: Farmers Guardian