Section 4: the key facts of Mr W’s complaint – problems with the Single Payment Scheme
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Mr W and his wife farm about 700 acres (roughly 283 hectares) in North Yorkshire. They took the farm over from his father in the 1960s and run it with their son and daughter-in-law. They are tenant farmers. They grow cereals, have some permanent grassland and also have breeding sheep and suckler cows. Mr W’s daughter-in-law also runs a free-range egg business.
Mr W’s early dealings with RPA about the Single Payment Scheme went well. In August 2004 RPA sent him an ‘Information Statement for the Single Payment Scheme’. It set out details of the animals and the area of land covered by payments under the previous aid schemes in 2000, 2001 and 2002. RPA has told us that in the same month, after a small amendment, Mr W agreed that the statement was right. On 4 May 2005 RPA received his Single Payment Scheme application for 2005.
Mapping problems begin
Six months later, in November 2005, RPA told Mr W that ten parcels of land covered by his claim were not on the Rural Land Register (paragraph 58). It asked for a map showing the fields’ location. The letter said: ‘the processing of your claim cannot progress until we have this information’, and that it needed the information within seven days of receipt of the letter. Within a week Mr W’s son had sent RPA the maps it needed. He told RPA that two of the field numbers had been amalgamated and that another field number, NZ 8712 6815, was not part of the farm’s claim – he said it was possible it had been mistaken for a field with a similar reference number, NZ 5712 6815. In December RPA sent Mr W a letter confirming that it had corrected the amalgamated field numbers.
In January 2006 RPA sent Mr W two further letters about mapping, including a duplicate of a letter it had sent him in December 2005. The only explanation for that in RPA’s papers is a note in RPA’s files made at the time by a caseworker. He said: ‘Someone had picked that task [see paragraph 81] and hadn’t completed it. So I picked it again and did the rest of the things’. At the end of January 2006 Mr W asked how he could access information from RPA’s website about how much his payment would be. RPA told him there was no facility to do that because it had still to establish definitive payments.
Contradictory information
Early in February 2006 RPA wrote to Mr W again, querying the location of fields. Nine of the ten fields it queried were the same fields queried in November 2005 and one of them was field number NZ 8712 6815 – not part of Mr W’s claim, as his son had explained in November. Mr W’s son contacted RPA. In a telephone call, it told him to ignore the letter. He wrote to RPA the same day saying: ‘At this late stage it is very distressing and worrying to still be getting the same queries as three months ago’. His letter said: ‘We are told payments are due to start next week, is all this confusion liable to delay my payment further? We have always answered all questions promptly, please can you give me some answers quickly to reduce the stress we are being put under, through no fault of [our] own’. RPA’s Rural Land Register maintenance unit replied, confirming that he should ignore their letter and saying that he had received his final set of maps. RPA has told us that, by mid-February 2006, it had established definitive 2005 Single Payment Scheme entitlements for farmers.
Rural Payments Agency says most statements and payments due by the end of March 2006
In the first week of March 2006 RPA asked Mr W for more information to support his 2005 Single Payment Scheme application. Ten days later, in mid-March 2006, Mr W’s son telephoned RPA to ask about the farm’s entitlement statement. This telephone call was the start of frequent contact between the Ws and RPA. RPA told Mr W that it planned to issue most statements and make most payments by the end of March, but it could not guarantee when they would receive their payment. Mr W called the same day. This time RPA told him it would get the entitlement statement sent out to him. The next day, 16 March, RPA noted that it had sent an ‘entitlement statement request’. On 17 March, when Mr W telephoned to ask for an update, RPA’s system showed that it had requested a statement. The official told him that the statement might be on its way but, given his concerns, they requested another. RPA told him to contact it again if he had not received the statement by 21 March 2006.
Mr W had expected to receive his entitlement statement by 31 December 2005, because that was the date given in the European Commission regulations. He has said that what he found most frustrating was that no one at RPA could tell him what the problem was and why he had not received his statement. He recognised that one particular RPA official was very helpful, but overall he had felt ‘fobbed off’, lied to, and that RPA was looking to catch him out in some way.
Absence of an entitlement statement or payment
Mr W called RPA three times on 21 March 2006. He had not received his statement and he asked to speak to a manager. RPA made a fresh request (the third) for an entitlement statement – the official who took the first call recorded that, despite the notes made by colleagues, no request seemed to have been made. The manager established that her colleagues had received the statement request and would arrange to make Mr W’s statement a priority. Mr W also told RPA that he had received another letter asking about field NZ 8712 6815 – the field that was not part of his claim, as the Ws had explained twice already. RPA established that it had received Mr W’s response about field NZ 8712 6815 and agreed to follow that up with colleagues. But it was unable to give Mr W a confident response about his entitlement statement. Mr W has said that each time he or his son telephoned RPA, they found themselves speaking to different officers in different locations.
RPA’s records show that Mr W telephoned again two days later. He explained he needed the statement in order to get credit from a feed supplier. He also mentioned a telephone call he had made to RPA the day before and asked for a response. RPA agreed to follow up his queries. We have seen no evidence of any follow-up action being taken. On the same day Mr W’s son emailed RPA, asking for a written explanation of what had happened to the statement. His email said:
‘Despite numerous phone calls to various departments that we have been passed to, no one has given us any answers as to why we are still without an entitlement statement. One [call] tells us all is in order, another tells us there are outstanding queries (when we questioned these we found these were things that had long since been clarified, and have a letter from yourselves to acknowledge that fact!), another told us it had already been posted out, today we are told it has not in fact been posted at all. We despair!! We can not seem to get to the bottom of this, on the telephone we never seem able to speak to anyone with any particular authority. Please can you give us some answers, you can imagine the stress this is placing on our family and the business.’
The email received an automated reply on the same day, with a commitment to respond within 15 working days. On 30 March 2006 RPA replied. It said that the request made for a statement on 21 March 2006 meant Mr W should receive his entitlement statement within the next few days, if it had not already arrived.
No statement arrived. On 6 April 2006 Mr W telephoned RPA again. The official who took his call asked colleagues to find out what had happened to the statement. She noted ‘Mr W is struggling for money and has marital problems due to this and is very concerned that he needs money to feed his animals’. Four days later he called again. RPA noted: ‘He seems distressed as he rents the farm and feels he no longer can carry on [farming] … His wife is no longer with him as she left last Friday [this proved to be only a temporary absence] and he has no money to pay his way. He really needs to know what he will be receiving so he can let his landlord know when he can pay his rent’. RPA attempted again to find out what had delayed the statement. The official emailed a colleague, asking for clarification. She explained Mr W’s distress, adding that he owed a lot of money to his landlord. She also asked why a ‘payment hold’ flag was on Mr W’s case when no action was outstanding on his claim. She said the system also held a rejected claim note for his case and she asked her colleague to investigate urgently. Also on 10 April 2006 the official telephoned Mr W and agreed to call him daily with updates.
Unexplained ‘payment hold’ flag
A ‘payment hold’ flag meant the claim had not been fully processed. RPA could not issue the payment until it finished the ‘tasks’ for the claim and removed the flag, although it could issue an entitlement statement. It has a list of the tasks for Mr W’s 2005 Single Payment Scheme claim. It holds 28 tasks: 24 are about ‘failed land cross checks’ or ‘land to be digitised’. The last date shown on the list is 24 March 2006. RPA has said that it holds no records of contact with Mr W about land parcels after 14 February 2006. (It does hold a copy of a letter to Mr W in June 2006, telling him that it had changed the classification of some land parcels for his 2005 claim.) We have seen no papers that explain the delay in issuing an entitlement statement.
Also on 10 April 2006 Mr W’s son contacted RPA by email. Among other things, he said ‘Have you any idea the pressure you are putting our business under? This is a family run partnership on tenanted land, hence no security for the bank with property assets etc’. RPA’s system sent an automated response with a list of answers to ‘frequently asked questions’.
Anxiety about money due for payment to the bank and the landlord
Just over a week later, on 19 April 2006, Mr W telephoned asking for an update. (We have seen no record of whether or not RPA made the daily telephone calls agreed earlier in April 2006.) The official who took the call noted that Mr W’s case was still being looked at. On 25 April 2006 the W family contacted RPA again. RPA noted that Mr W owed two months’ rent and his landlord was unsympathetic. The official noted that she and colleagues were looking into Mr W’s case. They were still seeking an explanation for the payment hold flag. Two days later the same RPA official telephoned Mr W. She told him she planned to send him a letter giving an estimate of his entitlements, subject to managers’ approval. She noted that Mr W needed something to show the bank that some money was due to him as he was ‘struggling to make ends meet’. She requested, again, an entitlement statement for Mr W. The next day, 28 April 2006, the same official telephoned Mr W. She had decided a statement would be more useful to him than the letter. Her note of the call said ‘He asked if it would be today as the weekend was a long one to get through … He seemed quiet but not tearful today’.
Early in May 2006 RPA was still unable to trace the statement, but had established that it should remove the payment hold flag which an official had queried a month earlier. It arranged, again, to resend the statement. The next day, 4 May 2006, RPA decided it was able to send Mr W a ‘letter of confirmation of his approximate entitlement’. He asked RPA about partial payments, but it was unable to tell him any dates for payment. He said that he hoped the letter would relieve some of the pressure from his landlord and the bank. On 5 May 2006 RPA wrote to Mr W, saying that it estimated his entitlement, calculated on his ‘non-validated’ statement, as being £46,777.74.
A day later, on 5 May 2006, the RPA official looking after Mr W’s case was asked for an update about it for senior management. Mr W had featured on a list as ‘one of many not to have received an entitlement statement’ in a meeting with RPA’s acting Chief Executive and a report on those delayed cases was going to the Minister.
On 10 May 2006 Mr W received a partial payment and Mrs W telephoned the RPA official to thank her for her help. The note made by the official said ‘She said on a personal note it could help them sort out their lives’. RPA told us that the partial payment was £37,129.07. Later in May 2006 Mr W asked William Hague MP to refer his complaint to me.
RPA’s records show that it sent Mr W a statement on 5 October 2006. He did not receive it. Four days later, on 9 October 2006, he telephoned RPA to ask about the balance of his payment for 2005. The official noted that his claim was authorised and asked a colleague to find out about the payment. Mr W telephoned again two weeks later, on 18 October 2006. The official told him the payment had gone through. RPA has told us it paid him £7,219.44 on 19 October (making his total payment £44,348.51). In November 2006 RPA sent him £129.01 interest on the late payment.
Mr W received his entitlement statement only in June 2007, after my Office’s intervention. The statement RPA had issued in October 2006 had not reached him.
Mr W’s comments: the effect of the 2005 Single Payment Scheme problems on Mr W and his family
Mr W has described how he and his family dared not delay paying their rent for the farm (due twice a year), although they had not received their Single Payment Scheme payment and had no evidence to show their creditors of how much the payment would be. That caused them intense anxiety. That was demonstrated in their telephone calls to RPA, which mention Mrs W’s decision to move out of the farm for a time. Their overdraft generally peaks in June when their largest bills fall due. In September 2005 they had taken out a bank loan of £15,000 (separate from the overdraft facility), and in November 2005 Mrs W had lent the farm business £5,000 of her own savings. Mr W has said that he and the family had become stressed and tired, had difficulty sleeping through worry and had come to dread receiving telephone calls and letters from RPA. They had seriously considered leaving farming. He has given these further details of how he believes the events of 2006 affected the farm.
- They sold 18 animals earlier than usual (in January, March and April 2006), at a cost they put at £200 a head, totalling £3,600.
- They were unable to afford to repair their fertiliser and straw spreaders or their hay turner. That required them to put in 184 extra hours of their own labour. They also believe their crop yields fell about 5% because of machinery problems.
- They were unable to replace their stock bull in December 2005 when they intended and as a result culled 9 animals in October 2006, which they would otherwise have expected to be in calf. They put the loss caused by that at £900, or £100 a head.
- Their free-range egg business started about a year late, losing a year’s trading worth £38,000, because they could afford to buy a large flock only in mid-December 2006 (as they needed to place the order five months in advance).
- They decided against bidding for 18 acres of land (which was sold in March 2006) on which the farm had grazed animals for many years. They felt they could not take on additional debt without knowing how much they would be paid.
- They lost early payment discounts because they paid their bills late.
- They incurred costs in their own time; in £75 of telephone calls; and almost £640 of professional fees in pursuing their complaint, including providing evidence to my Office of the injustice they had suffered.
- They incurred interest on loans.
