Civil servants criticised for withholding UK CAP data

Details of 2009 CAP payments were due to be published across the EU at the end of last week, under European Commission rules.

However, a message on the Defra website page http://cap-payments.defra.gov.uk where CAP details are published annually states: “Due to the General Election campaign, this website will not be updated with the 2009 figures until after the election.”

The decision reflects the fact that some election candidates are recipients of subsidies.

A Defra spokeswoman said the ‘brief delay reflects the need to maintain the impartiality of the UK Civil Service, given the potential risk that CAP payment information relating to any individuals involved in the election might be used as part of election campaigning’.

The data will be published ‘as soon as possible after the election’, although the timing could be affected if there is a hung parliament.

Farmsubsidy.org, which campaigns for transparency in CAP payments, criticised the decision.

It said that so far, data on 38.3 billion euros of payments had been ‘harvested’ from the 27 member states out of a total CAP budget of 55bn euros.

The group, led by co-founder Jack Thurston, said that while in some cases member states have made the data easy to access, others appear to have taken ‘deliberate steps to block access’.

By Tuesday (May 4), 21 member states had provided complete data with partial data coming from France, Greece, Cyprus, Italy and Portugal.

Only the UK had withheld all its data ‘for political reasons’, the group said, pointing out that the Scottish Government has published its data.

Mr Thurston said the decision by civil servants was ‘without precedent and has provoked the disapproval of the Commission’.

“This week’s data harvest represents the efforts of a remarkable group of European investigative journalists, researchers and civic hackers. Some countries have tried to make it difficult for us but we now can provide European citizens with a really detailed overview of who got what in farm subsidies in 2009,” he said.

He said the data showed ‘some very large payments going to big multinational companies and some of Europe’s biggest and most wealthy landowners’.

“At a time when public budgets are under real pressure, we need to ask whether CAP is providing good value for taxpayers money or in need of radical reorientation,” he said.

The data has so far revealed 1,212 ‘subsidy millionaires’, with more to come, compared with 1,040 in 2008. Germany tops the list with 268 millionaire recipients, while sugar processing companies across Europe are very much to the fore.

The list can be viewed here::

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=0At9hEvGB0JsUdFZxUTdH%20WEpWeWxoYmtfVXJpSnNIdHc&gid=1

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