We need to be helping farmers, not kicking them

DIt gives me no pleasure at all to draw your attention yet again to the goings-on at the Rural Payments Agency (RPA) which, the last time I checked, still formed part of your extensive empire.

As you will be only too well aware I have had occasion many times to raise its performance – and farmers’ dissatisfaction therewith – in my correspondence to you.

Yet here we are again with another crop of complainants calling it out for the ‘brutal’ attitude it adopts towards farmers. Particularly, it seems, when payments are disputed.

The general RPA philosophy can be summarised succinctly as: Farmers are always wrong. They are all guilty until proved innocent. The RPA is always right even when it is wrong.Even when the fact that it is wrong becomes abundantly evident this will not be acknowledged, nor any apology delivered. No attempt will be made to facilitate the rapid reimbursement of any overpayment or wrongly imposed fine.

Well, they’re only farmers after all. The thing is, George, that the RPA seems unable to accept the fact that farmers are desperately busy people and that negotiating the complicated network of farm support applications is a fiendish task, to the point where errors sometimes occur. In the vast majority of cases entirely innocently because given the plethora of checks and balances that are in place only a fool would attempt to fiddle the system – and there are relatively few fools in the farming community. But rather than adopting a conciliatory attitude and negotiating a way through mis-filed applications, the RPA seems automatically to treat farmers as though they’ve got a list of previous as long as your arm and are – excuse the pun – cereal offenders.

And in those cases where the RPA has been at fault so that farmers have been left thousands of pounds out of pocket and reimbursement is due, actually obtaining it has ranked in difficulty on a par with getting fertiliser out of the rear end of a rocking horse.

You don’t need me to remind you that the RPA has, George, a distinctly inglorious past in that its dilatory antics, its bungling and incompetence cost us the thick end of £1 billion in EU fines. Perhaps, indeed, it’s the very fact that it is no longer subject to such sanctions and is answerable only to itself that has led the RPA into this latest round of acrimonious encounters.

It’s odd, George, that in every other country I can think of, Government agencies that are concerned with farming do all they can to encourage and support them whereas here the opposite seems to be the case. I am sure you will deny the existence of any anti-farmer sentiment within Defra but let me just cite the case of the daughter of a farming constituent who used to work in the department but had to leave because she could no longer live with the sight and sound of her colleagues standing to cheer whenever some dispute with a farmer was settled in Defra’s favour.

In case you haven’t looked out of the window recently, not only are farmers really up against it financially at the moment but they are facing new challenges in supplying us with food in the fact of wars, pestilence, famine and pretty well any other adverse influences you can name. We need to be helping them, not kicking them.

By the way, I was pleased to see the Government is adopting my suggestion that the best way of getting on top of fly-tipping is to abolish the charges for DIY waste disposal so ruthlessly demanded at recycling centres. The whole thing is totally logical: foregoing a relatively footling amount in disposal charges will save us all huge bills in clearing up the countryside. I will, naturally, keep the ideas coming.