Government not playing fair with CAP reform

‘Fairness for taxpayers, fairness for the environment and fairness for farmers,’ has been the mantra of Westminster Ministers as they outline the UK Government’s stance on CAP reform.

So who have they been trying to kid?

Very few UK farmers will see any fairness in the Government’s plans to cut their direct payments by 20 per cent to fund rural development measures when elsewhere in Europe that money will go straight into farmers’ pockets.

It is one thing to argue for CAP funding to be gradually shifted away from direct payments towards rural development, as UK Ministers have been doing for some time.

But it is another entirely to do it unilaterally in a way that will blatantly disadvantage your own farmers, not to mention fly in the face of Defra utterances to support productive farming.

Yet this is precisely what the UK Government is asking for the power to do, as talks on CAP reform become more meaningful.

So what is going on?

There appear to be two drivers behind the UK’s requests for the flexibility to move as much as a fifth of direct payment money across to rural development – flexibility few, if any, other member states will take up (in fact a number are looking to move funds the other to boost direct payments).

 One is the long-held philosophical view within HM Treasury that Single Payments are somehow ‘dead money’ that line the pockets of aristocratic landowners and ‘slipper farmers’, yielding no benefit to the taxpayer. Agri-environment schemes and other rural development measures are simply ‘better targeted at public goods’, is the official Government line on this.

The other driver is cash flow. The UK has always had an historically low share of EU rural development funds.  Under current allocations, there would simply not be enough cash in the pot to fund the UK’s, and particularly England’s, ambitious agri-environment scheme plans over the next decade or so.

The flexibility sought by the UK would conveniently allow these schemes to be funded by slashing direct payments to farmers, rather than continuing the current expensive Treasury match funding of ‘modulated’ money. A neat solution in the Age of Austerity.

 But surely, as the UK farming unions point out, the answer should be to fight harder for a fairer – to taxpayers, the environment and farmers – share of the rural development pot in ongoing EU budget negotiations.

Because the biggest concern in all of this would be if the UK’s request was a signal it has effectively given up on getting a fairer deal on rural development from Brussels.

That would simply be unfair on everybody.

Learning IT…slowly

AS ONE Defra agency appears to be finally learning the painful lessons of IT rollouts gone wrong, another seems to have walked into the same trap.

Defra and the Rural Payments Agency infamously pressed the ‘go’ button on the agency’s creaking IT system in February 2006 hoping to launch thousands of SPS 2005 payments before the system was ready or had even been properly tested. The rest is history – as ex-Defra Permanent Secretary Dame Helen Ghosh put it so eloquently, the payments simply ‘gummed up’ the system which could not cope.

RPA has been dealing with the fallout ever since and now, six years on, appears to be reaching something approaching stability.

SPS 2011 payments, although there are still problems, are flowing more easily than ever before and communications – a massive failure in the early crisis-ridden days of SPS – are improving both internally and to farmers (or ‘customers’ as RPA still insists on calling them).

There is, unlike before, now ‘a plan’, as RPA boss Mark Grimshaw likes to say. The agency’s efforts to address its deep-rooted problems and to prepare properly for the massive challenge of CAP reform will be laid out in its soon-to-be-published five-year plan.

One lesson clearly learned is that never again will a system be launched without having been fully tested and shown to work.

Meanwhile, AHVLA is having its own problems with an IT roll out that has effectively ‘gummed up’.

The £12m project is, on one level, small fry compared with the scale of the RPA fiasco or other Government IT flops like the £12bn NHS waste of taxpayer money.

But it is having an impact on the control of bTB, from bureaucratic frustration at farm and vet level to delays in collection of reactors and the collation of data, at a time when the fight against the disease is being ratcheted up a level.

It raises a number of questions.

Why were the problems now being experienced with ‘Release 6’not picked up before it was rolled out? When will they be fixed? And at what cost?

Have Defra/AHVLA been as transparent with vets and farmers as they could have been?

All of this will no doubt be answered in the independent review commissioned into the problem by AHVLA. Farmers and vets will await the outcome with interest.

Spending cuts will test Defra to its limit

Farmers and civil servants are not natural bedfellows.

Ask anyone who has been on the receiving end of an RPA inspection or who has been subject to an Environment Agency investigation.

For many, the very mention of bureaucracy and inspections is enough to bring on a feeling of impending doom. So, is it any wonder that the story most commented on this week at www.farmersguardian.com is headlined Defra spending cuts will be bloody.

There were precious few people on our website willing to stick up for Defra, and even fewer who were positive about Natural England and the Environment Agency.

The day of a thousand cuts dawns

IT IS the day reality bites – for the Coalition Government and its public.

The pre-election debate, between Labour and Tories in particular, was defined by the age old left-right debate how to drag yourself out of recession – spend or cut.

The Tories, with a little help from their Lib Dem friends, won and today – October 20, 2010 – is the long promised day of reckoning. The day that will change people’s lives and, even at this very early stage, could define how long David Cameron stays in power.

The Comprehensive Spending Review, set to be unveiled at 12.30 today, is as the NFU’s Martin Haworth said yesterday going to be ‘bloody’, with the aftershock felt across Government and society.