Section 5: the key facts of Mr Y’s complaint – problems with mapping land

Mr Y farms about 1,200 acres (roughly 485 hectares) of arable land in East Anglia. His farm is in an area of outstanding natural beauty. As well as farming, he runs a campsite and a hostel for backpackers. He is part of various environmental schemes and he wanted to join the Entry Level Stewardship Scheme with effect from 2005. In his complaint to me, Mr Y said that his farm could survive only with the help of EU subsidies.

Entry Level Stewardship is one of the Environmental Stewardship schemes which started in 2005. They are part of the funding for rural areas provided by the EU’s European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development. The schemes were, and are, separate from the Single Payment Scheme and go beyond the Single Payment Scheme requirement to keep land in good agricultural and environmental order. Their object is to encourage farmers to conserve wildlife and protect natural resources, among other things. The Rural Development Service, now part of Natural England, relied on the mapping data collected by RPA through the Rural Land Register in order to handle claims under the schemes.

Mr Y had found, and corrected, errors in the RPA maps of his farm since 2003. But the story of his dealings with RPA and the Single Payment Scheme began in earnest in summer 2004, when RPA sent him a first set of maps as part of its work on the Rural Land Register. In December 2004 it sent him what it believed to be a final set. In spring 2005 Mr Y’s agent sent RPA details of fields, using the IACS22 forms used for registering land. The first form, sent in March 2005, showed amendments needed to the maps held by RPA, but also showed parcels of land that needed to be registered for the first time. Also in March 2005, RPA produced two further sets of maps. In early April Mr Y told RPA about a boundary error he had noticed in those maps.

In April 2005 RPA set up a system to prioritise people who needed land registration applications to be processed in order to make their Entry Level Stewardship applications.

Repeated mapping errors

Also in April 2005 Mr Y’s agent sent RPA another IACS22 form for four parcels of land that needed to be registered. The same month Mr Y wrote again to RPA about further errors in the maps produced in March. One of the errors was in the boundary of a field, which I shall call ‘Long Field’, for which Mr Y had been claiming subsidy for seven years. Mr Y has used that field to sum up his dealings with RPA:

‘[This field’s] boundaries have not changed during that time. The digital maps I was sent in March [2005] showed the boundaries as having moved. I corrected the relevant map and returned it (with others). On finally receiving new maps, the RPA had allocated to [my farm] the field next to [Long Field] – this field does not belong to us and is farmed by a neighbour. I corrected the error. The subsequent map omitted [Long Field] altogether!’

In the first week of May 2005 Mr Y received a further set of maps from RPA, prepared in response to the form his agent had submitted in April. In the same week he sent RPA his 2005 Single Payment Scheme application and documents detailing the errors, new or still uncorrected, in the maps produced by RPA. In mid-May 2005 Mr Y asked Defra for an Entry Level Stewardship application pack. It told him he could not enter the scheme unless the land was registered on the Rural Land Register.

Mapping backlogs at Rural Payments Agency

By this stage, May 2005, Mr Y expected to miss the first round of Entry Level Stewardship agreements. At this stage, the application deadline for the first agreement start date was 31 May 2005. He had received maps updated to include the additions made in the form his agent had submitted in April 2005, but had received nothing to show the changes and additions in the form submitted in March 2005. The Northallerton RPA office had told him there were 2,500 people on their ‘priority’ list for applications to have land registered. He contacted the NFU to find out how he might join that list. After a telephone call to RPA, Mr Y told the NFU and Henry Bellingham MP:

‘The computer collapses whenever they try to do a big IACS22. So they are playing the numbers game and pushing through all the small ones. They have to stop work after 5 fields and reload the maps again. My correction letters of 23rd April, not on an IACS22, might be in a miscellaneous box and have not been looked at yet. These are unlikely to be looked at for at least 2 months. Unless I list all these extra parcels and errors on an [Entry Level Stewardship application], this farm will not even get on the priority list.’

Looking back on this time, Mr Y has said ‘the individual, front-line staff I have dealt with … have been courteous and as helpful as they possibly could be in the circumstances. However, I had the overwhelming impression that, try as an individual might, the real failure to deliver lay far above them, at a senior level’.

In the third week of May 2005 Defra extended the deadline for the first round of Environmental Stewardship agreements from 31 May to 1 July 2005. It later extended it to 15 July 2005.

Also in May 2005, Mr Y faxed the Rural Development Service. His fax said ‘I formally send this fax to apply for Entry Level Scheme for this farm’. He attached copies of his letters to RPA and the accompanying notes. He asked: ‘As I understand the situation all these matters need resolving before I can provide you with a completed application. Please confirm that this is the case and let me know when they will be done’. He asked what could be done to speed up the Entry Level Stewardship application process. The Rural Development Service managed to have his name added to the list of priority cases for land registration.

Mr Y stayed in touch with RPA throughout June 2005. He also contacted the NFU with details of the trouble he was having with RPA. He said ‘I have no confidence whatever that the maps I receive will be correct when they arrive. What happens then?’ By the end of June 2005 he had established from RPA that his IACS22 forms were with its Northallerton office. But RPA held only some of the detailed explanations he had sent it. And it did not know he was on the priority list. An official told him that the computer system locked when two people worked on maps for neighbouring fields, forcing them to stop work and start afresh.

On 15 July 2005 RPA closed its Environmental Stewardship priority list for land registration in order to focus on making Single Payment Scheme payments in February 2006.

Lack of a co-ordinated response from Rural Payments Agency

In August 2005 Mr Y emailed RPA, saying ‘I have previously written, faxed or emailed several different people in several different offices as had been requested. The problem seems [to be] that each letter and email is being dealt with separately’. He asked it to give him one person to look after his case. RPA told Mr Y it would allocate his case to the most capable member of staff and it aimed to finish editing the maps as soon as possible. At the same time, Henry Bellingham MP intervened on Mr Y’s behalf. Just over a week later RPA’s Rural Land Register maintenance unit contacted Mr Y and he sent them fresh copies of material he had sent before, including the maps RPA had produced in March and in May. He told RPA that the cost of photocopying and postage came to almost £60. Adding the sixteen-and-a-half hours of his own time, at £90 an hour, he put the total cost of providing the information at £1,814.55, including VAT.

Mr Y’s contact in the maintenance unit sent the material to his colleagues in the mapping department and on the same day, 18 August 2005, the mapping department wrote to Mr Y saying that they had captured on the Rural Land Register the changes he had requested. The letter, which covered three fields, had contact details but did not make clear what part of the information from Mr Y (the March 2005 IACS22 form, the April 2005 form or his corrections to the maps he had received) the mapping section had considered. Mr Y emailed his contact to say he had received the information. He added that one of the maps RPA had sent him contained a new mistake – RPA had corrected a boundary error for Long Field, but had allocated a neighbour’s field to him. He asked for a full set of maps so that he could check them. Also in August 2005, Defra announced that the Rural Development Service was encouraging farmers to apply for the Environmental Stewardship schemes based on the land shown in their application packs, even if it was incomplete. Mr Y has said that he saw Defra’s announcement, but when he spoke to officials at the Rural Development Service, the situation had been more complex than it seemed. He could put in an incomplete application, but he would not be able simply to top up that application once he had complete maps. He would, in effect, have to make a further application for the areas of the farm that were missing from the maps and it would need to stand on its own, with its own start and end date. Their advice was not to apply. Mr Y has said he would have applied at this stage if just one small track was missing. But the gaps were so large that he decided to wait, because he considered the administrative problems of running different applications on that scale would be too great for him to manage.

In mid-September 2005 RPA’s Chief Executive replied to Mr Bellingham. He said RPA had captured the edits to Mr Y’s maps and was due to load the data that week. It would then be available to the Rural Development Service. He said RPA was also about to send Mr Y a new set of maps. He apologised for the problems Mr Y had faced and said RPA had seen an unprecedented increase in requests for new or changed land registrations. To mitigate the effect of the delays, the Rural Development Service had introduced monthly start dates for the stewardship schemes, instead of quarterly, he said. At the end of September RPA sent Mr Y the new set of maps mentioned in the Chief Executive’s letter.

In October 2005 Mr Y received the new maps. The next day Mr Y emailed his contact at the Rural Land Register maintenance unit. He asked about an ‘IACS inspection 2004’ mentioned in the papers with the maps. He also pointed out three errors on the maps he had received. For example, the new maps still allocated his neighbour’s field to him. He asked again for a full set of maps so that he could check them. On the same day, he received an update from the NFU. They told him that, in a meeting with RPA the week before, officials had given them the clear impression that his ‘IACS22’ (the land registration form he had submitted) was finished, apart from quality control checks. Mr Y received no reply from RPA, although the Rural Development Service did write to him to ask about the stewardship application he was due to make to them. In mid-November he emailed his contact in the Rural Land Register maintenance unit again, asking for a response. The official told him he was unable to reply because Mr Y’s case was with the ministerial complaints team. (RPA has said that after Mr Y contacted his MP about his case, it had changed his contact to someone in the ministerial correspondence team.)

Further mapping errors

Mr Y received a set of 37 maps in December 2005. They held errors which Mr Y had highlighted in May 2005, when he made his Single Payment Scheme application. He made contact with an official in the Rural Land Register mapping section and, just before Christmas 2005, returned 15 of the 37 sheets of maps to be corrected.

Mr Y’s situation seemed no better to him in the new year. RPA sent him some corrections on 6 January 2006 and he stayed in touch with the mapping section throughout January, February and March 2006 about the amendments needed. In January 2006 he told RPA that he was considering making at least one man redundant because he had missed out on Entry Level Stewardship for this year. In February 2006 RPA queried an entry in his Single Payment Scheme application for 2005, the form he had submitted in May 2005. The same month Mr Y noted that RPA had told him the mapping system was down and it would be the beginning of March before it received the next upload from the contractors. RPA also told him the Entry Level Stewardship maps would not include the changes he had sent in December 2005.

In April 2006, having received piecemeal corrections but feeling unable to check them adequately until he received a complete set of maps, Mr Y emailed Mr Bellingham about the problems he was facing: he had still to receive a correct set of maps; without them he could not apply for Entry Level Stewardship. He said:

‘I have already made one man redundant (he leaves in a week’s time), another has left voluntarily. My two remaining farmworkers keep asking me what is happening or should they start looking for other jobs now. In the present situation it is virtually impossible to make even a short term plan for next harvest, let alone a 5 to 10 year plan. This is needed as I am now 61 years old.’

Separately, Mr Y’s exchanges with RPA about the errors and corrections to the maps continued through April and May 2006. On 14 May 2006 he submitted his 2006 Single Payment Scheme application: a 51-page form, 7 continuation sheets, 8 maps, cross-referenced notes and a covering letter. (In April 2007 he received the set of maps on which his 2005 scheme award had been based – 2 fields were missing.)

Also in May 2006 RPA sent Mr Y a partial 2005 Single Payment Scheme payment of £72,351.01. (It sent him the balance of £13,783.29 in September 2005 and paid him £191.45 interest on the payments made after the 30 June 2006 regulatory deadline.)

In July 2006, after one further set of corrections, Mr Y received a set of maps that he considered to be correct. He asked for a summary map. RPA has said that it received an email from Mr Y on 6 July confirming that the maps he had recently received were correct. In fact, there were still problems with his maps.

In October 2006 Mr Y received his Entry Level Stewardship application pack. (He has said it took some chasing to obtain the pack.) He found that the maps he received with the pack were wrong. He summarised the problems in an email to the Rural Development Service. He said:

‘Three substantially sized fields have been left off the maps and listings altogether. These alone total 28.95 hectares. At least one land parcel was listed on the summary sheet but not marked on the map. No handbook was enclosed with the pack. Several discrepancies between these maps and the ones I received from RPA mapping. I am still trying to sort out the actual details. Summary, I am still not able to apply for [Entry Level Stewardship].’

He also said that a Rural Development Service official had told him the RPA mapping computer and their own computer were not sharing information effectively; that they were having to produce manually the maps for larger farms; and some fields were not listed under his holding and he would have to go back to RPA. He asked the Rural Development Service to liaise with RPA as he believed the July 2006 maps had been correct (he later identified two minor corrections which he gave RPA in October 2006). He also sent the incorrect maps to RPA, highlighting the errors.

Agreement on maps and the change to the Stewardship rules

RPA has told us that in November 2006 Mr Y agreed a set of maps for Entry Level Stewardship.

In January 2007 Mr Y and his agent, having received an Entry Level Stewardship application pack and maps, decided he should submit his application. One parcel of land was missing because it could not be uploaded to the Entry Level Stewardship computer, but they decided they should press on despite that. His application was accepted. Nine months later, in October 2007, Mr Y received his first Entry Level Stewardship payment – £8,103.50. But within months he realised that EU changes to the terms of Entry Level Stewardship, applied with effect from 1 January 2007, would affect his farm. (The changes to the scheme would not have affected him if he had had an agreement in place by 1 January 2007. The information released in December 2006 by Defra shows that it would only have been possible to make that date if he had submitted an application in, at the latest, October 2006.) In January 2008 Mr Y pulled out of Entry Level Stewardship.

Mr Y’s comments: the effect of the mapping problems on Mr Y

Mr Y had planned to apply to Entry Level Stewardship as soon as he could – joining in June 2005 and receiving the first payment in December 2005. Instead, his application had not been accepted until March/April 2007, because he did not have an accurate set of maps covering his entire holding. He received his first payment in October 2007 – 22 months later than he had expected. He gave these examples of what that had meant for him and his business.

• He made one employee redundant at a cost of about £8,500 in May 2006.
• He lost approximately £34,000 in subsidy (£17,000 per year for two years).
• He unnecessarily incurred land agent’s fees.
• To address cash flow problems, he had sold 400 tonnes of wheat earlier in the year than was usual and at a lower price than usual.
• At times, he had been working on the paperwork at 4.30 in the morning and he had had to hire staff – a farmworker, a labourer and a tourism worker – to make up for the time he spent on paperwork. He incurred avoidable photocopying costs.
• His health had suffered and he had seriously contemplated giving up farming two years previously. His son had decided against going into farming.

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