BPS blog: Back to school

He writes:

So February has arrived along with the RPA’s ‘witching hour’ for their much vaunted promise that they would pay ‘the vast majority’ of BPS payments by the end of January.

The Minister said last week that by the end of January 75% of claimants should be paid. While these figures might be a lot better than some of us were fearing last spring when the IT went  ‘belly up’ with no Plan B in place, the painful fact is the ‘vast majority’ target has not been hit.

While Defra and the RPA might desperately defend the record by insisting 75% is ‘a vast majority’ unfortunately they are condemned by the government’s education inspectorate. OFSTED (see right) is quite clear that when it comes to assessing school performance then ‘vast majority’ means 95% plus. The NFU have generously said that they would accept 80% as a pass. By either metric, the examiners mark is still an ‘F’.

We still have 20,000 farmers unpaid and this just isn’t acceptable. While the 67,000 ‘haves’ are now satisfied, the 20,000 ‘have nots’ become more frustrated as every unfulfilled day goes by.

To make matters worse, RPA communications have been nothing short of shambolic.

By the end of January we had thousands of unpaid claimants who were understandably of the view that as they hadn’t received the ‘letter of doom’ informing them that ‘they were unlikely to be paid by the end of January’ then it was reasonable to assume they would be paid before February. You could go as far as to say these people had an inferred promise that has now been broken. But to add to the mayhem, as the witching hour approached on the last day of January, we have a sudden outburst of emails from the RPA sent out to farmers telling them that because they had been inspected they would now be paid from February onwards. There is something profoundly reminiscent of a Marx brothers’ film  in telling people on the last day of January for payment that they would now be paid from ‘February onwards’. Just to add to the angst these people were previously blissfully unaware they had been inspected. The reason being they had been remotely inspected by satellite in secret. Not surprisingly it was a case of confusion added to confusion due to appalling RPA communications. And then, just to add a final triple dose of confusion it now seems that some of the email recipients hadn’t actually been inspected and were sent the message by mistake. So, slowly but surely the fog has been made even thicker by extra added heavy weather from the RPA comms department.

So our call to Defra and the RPA is not only to get the outstanding millions out sooner rather than later to cash strapped farmers many of whom don’t know whether they need to go to see the bank manager or not, but also they also need to drastically improve their communications which is adding to anxiety levels rather than decreasing it.  

Despite all this, we only but hope the RPA plan to get all possible payments out by early March so to allow farmers to have confidence over what data to use for 2016 claims. But as ever, we will only believe it when we see it.

Meanwhile, while we remain focused on getting remaining payments out, we need to start thinking about next year. In many ways you can trace the current shambles back to bad decisions made over twelve months ago. We need to make sure lessons have been learnt and mistakes are not to be repeated. If I had to pull out a handful of key points for Defra and the RPA here they would be…