ON Monday parliament shut down until after the election and we say a very sad farewell to our sitting MP Anne McIntosh, who was deselected in rather unsavoury fashion by the local Conservative party.

I have yet to find anyone in the agricultural world who met the decision with approval.

Anne has served my industry and the country in this last parliament as chairman of the highly-important EFRA committee; and in her final session last week, they questioned ministers, Defra and the RPA about the BPS fiasco.

The report of this very sensible and responsible committee was published at the end of last week and pulled no punches:

• Back in 2013 the committee had warned Defra of the potential problems for an online-only approach, when effective rural broadband was inadequate and a complex new scheme would present too many challenges.

• There appears to have been no contingency plan and as recently as March 11, eight days ahead of the U-turn, Liz Truss repeated that the RPA would “do what it takes” to make sure that the system works.

• The RPA has previously given evidence that paper based applications would simply be impossible.

Listen to what Ian Trenholm, director general and chief operating officer, said: “Calculating in real time the size of fields and features, particularly in relation to more complex policies stipulated by the EU such as three-crop rules, just cannot be done on a piece of paper. That is what we are learning.”

The committee is concerned that Defra and Co have failed to learn the lessons of 2006 when the SPS payment system broke down and, as a result, this country paid more than £580m in fines.

• Going forward Anne McIntosh insists that Defra and the RPA must now ensure that the paper based systems can be efficiently implemented in time with sufficient accuracy to safeguard farmers' incomes and the public purse.

From the undertones of the report, Mark Grimshaw of the RPA has done his best to implement an impossible task set by Defra, which has opted to stay in the shadows rather than to come out and shoulder the blame.

Thank you Anne for yet another honest and unbiased critique of muddled government thinking.

 

Farmer wins RPA claim

I AM not suggesting that every fine or penalty imposed by the RPA should be challenged but neither is it necessarily a lost cause.

Last year, we took the establishment to task and after a lot of posturing resistance, they conceded by returning about £20,000 to our client.

In a more recent case last week, a young Hereford farmer missed the claim deadline because the advice he received from the RPA was wrong. After three years of stressful rambling, never mind financial hardship, the RPA admitted their error.

The Parliamentary Ombudsman awarded the farmer his full payment of £45,000-plus interest and £1,000 compensation.

 

OSR market warning

I SPOTTED an article forecasting a record crop of soya bean in South America which is not good news for those farmers with OSR left to sell.

The bumper harvest in Brazil and Argentina will be over by May and global supplies are going to be flushed to the brim. The current price of £254 per tonne for OSR may look more tempting.

 

New strategy for National Trust land

THE National Trust own 250,000 hectares of land which is a considerable chunk by anybody’s standards despite much of it being unfarmable.

Last week they announced a new 10 year strategy to safeguard their land from what they call “decades of unsustainable land management which has seen intensive farming… undermine the long term health of the land”.

The NT has been, and still is, a brilliant institution for protecting the nation’s heritage and particularly its treasure chest of country houses; but their high flying ever greener policies over practical farming issues are a worry.

There has to be a balance in everything and fundamentally provision of food for this country comes first.

The NT should listen more to the voice of its farming tenants, and seek to work in partnership with them.

How do we get across to the public that the vast majority of farmers support, and indeed create a sustainable environment?