Virtual Farming Anyone?

I have been following this in Private Eye.

Well at least the Rural Payments Agency have started paying out after hoarding the money for nearly 2 years!

The whole system does appear to be a jok, but then does the whole New Labour rural policy.... and on that note I best stop as I'm talking Party Politics!!!!!

How about to safeguard the ticket offices on LU, the booking clerks can start not-rearing pigs?

I've just spotted this and it really does not surprise me at all as someone who works for Natural England (formerly a division of Defra). The Rural Payments Agency are the bane of our lives, causing is no end of problems for which we get the angry farmers on the phone.

Basically, we set up and manage agri-environmental schemes in which the farmers/land owners agree to manage their land in an environmentally-beneficial way in exchange for money to compensate them for the extra income they could be receiving for farming more intensively; these are for the most part based on the areas of land parcels (in theory 1 field = 1 parcel, but in reality 1 field can be many parcels and 1 parcel can be many fields or parts of many fields.
The problem is that for >90% of what we do, the money is actually paid to the farm by the Rural Payments Agency, but this is less than 5% of what they do so we get put to the bottom of the pile. Also, they control the register of official parcel identities and their areas, which wouldn't be an issue if they didn't arbitrarily change the boundaries and areas of the parcels. We have to prepare everything on a snapshot of data that is up to a year old, which is then checked against live data at every stage of the process - if anything changes, we have to go back and altar everything we've done to reflect the new data, not infrequently this takes considerable effort to work out what has changed and adjust everything (e.g. if one field is changed from one parcel to two, we have to change every reference to the parcel and its area to two parcels and areas in documents that can run to over 50 pages), produce and print new maps, and sometimes send this all back to the farmer for them to sign again, even though there is no net change in any area or payment). All of this takes time we could better spend doing other things, especially as we are understaffed and have the wrong staff (historically there was a need for specialists so that is what most staff are (field officers (some with more specific specialities), administrators, and cartographers) but a couple of years ago the systems changed so that the ideal staff member is now a top-level agricultural generalist who is also a good administrator and computer operator with at least a basic knowledge and understanding of mapping - I've yet to meet someone with this skill set), which causes farmers to ring and write in and complain, which we have to deal with meaning we aren't doing other things. And then to top it off the RPA has other data we need to get changed/clarified/added on their system (as their data is wrong/incomplete/out of date), sometimes this takes one official form and a couple of days, on at least one occasion this took over six months and was only completed (in less than two hours) when the farmer's MP got involved.

In theory, one agency to handle all payments to farmers is a good idea. But the way it has been implemented (it is an empire that considers itself far more important than any other organisation) and the apparent incompetence of a large number of their staff and/or systems means it is has been a disaster.