NFU Vice President Guy Smith writes:
For the 11-12,000 of us still waiting it seems hopeful that we will be paid before the closing of the May 16th application window but it's getting uncomfortably tight. We are assured most the commoners will get paid by the first week of April and the inspected before the last week of April. The reasons we are given for the lack of payment activity since early February involves the dreaded word 'IT'. We can only hope that next year the IT is ready before the opening of the payment window on 1st December rather than being put in place three months after it.
As one of those unpaid - I worked out the other day that seeing as I had filed my 2015 claim with the RPA in late May then they had now been gestating it for over nine and a half months. If this was a pregnancy then the word 'overdue' and the phrase 'we need to think about inducing things' would come to mind.
And while over ten thousand still wait for money, 86,000 wait for claims statements. These, we are assured, will hit farmhouse doormats before mid April - except,of course, for those still unpaid by then.
The worrying fact is that with a mere eight weeks between now and May 16th, everyone, both claimants and the RPA, are working on a very compressed timetable. There is much to do in a much shorter time-frame than usual. Apart from payments and claims statements to send out there are queries and errors to sort out on three fronts - payment, mapping and data. There will also be the usual RLE1 work to do to get things in order for the coming year. Without doubt things are very pressurised and you can only hope that with the application window now open that the clock is ticking.
The next few weeks are vital with very little room for error when it comes to the effective operation of the application process. For the poetry buffs amongst you I'll leave you with a couple of lines. The first is from TS Eliot's opener in 'The Wasteland' and the second is Browning's start to 'Home thoughts from Abroad' and is a bit more uplifting:
'April is the cruelest month'
'Oh to be in England now that April's there.'