Damning report casts future of RPA into doubt

A report by the National Audit Office’s (NAO), published today (Thursday, October 16), concluded the agency had wasted £680 million of taxpayers’ money on fines and administrative bungles between 2005 and 2009.

The devastating verdict on the agency’s performance was delivered just 48 hours after RPA chief executive Tony Cooper was forced to apologise to farmers over problems with its latest project - the re-mapping of English farmland.

The NAO, in its third report on the SPS crisis, found £304m has been spent by the agency since 2005 on hundreds of extra staff to cope with the miscalculation of payments and to manage a ‘poorly designed IT system’.

A further £43m has been squandered on irrecoverable overpayments, while farmers have borne a further £52m bill for fees and charges due to late and inaccurate payments. In addition, Defra has had to set aside £280m for ‘disallowance and penalties’ to the European Commission.

Although the agency’s timing of payments has now improved, the NAO said the cost of the scheme was still ‘high and increasing’, averaging £1,743 per claim, compared with £285 per claim in Scotland.

Amyas Morse, head of the NAO, said there had been a ‘lack of senior management ownership’ of the SPS in the agency and Defra, even though the risks had been highlighted in previous reports.

Speaking at a press briefing, the NAO’s Phil Gibby said Defra and the RPA had shown ‘scant regard’ to protecting public coffers and the agency had ‘definitely not’ delivered value for money.

The NAO report recommended that Defra commissions an external organisation to help the RPA out of its mess. Mr Gibby said it would not be out of the question to replace the agency.

“This is our third critical report and the agency still has not got to grips with the problem. If it can’t deal with the job maybe we should bring someone else in,” he said.

A Defra spokesman said the NAO report would be ‘valuable’ in taking forward Defra’s current review of the RPA.

Mr Cooper faced farmers at an NFU council meeting in Warwickshire on Tuesday. He said delivery of 2009 SPS payments was on course to be ahead of last year when 69,000 farmers were paid in December.

He also sought to reassure farmers that the problems with the re-mapping process would not affect 2010 SPS and agri-environment payments, although he admitted the process was taking longer than anticipated.

He revealed 80 per cent of farmers had returned their new maps within the 28-day deadline and apologised for the RPA’s failure to ‘deliver our side of the bargain’.

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