GOVERNMENT FARM PAYMENT DELAYS 'AN AVOIDABLE SHAMBLES'

10.00.00am BST (GMT +0100) Fri 7th Sep 2007

West Midlands Liberal Democrat MEP Liz Lynne today attacked DEFRA and its Rural Payments Agency (RPA) over its failure to get EU subsidies to thousands of farmers on time.

£1.5 billion worth of payments should have been made to farmers in England by March 2006 under the EU's single farm payment scheme, but only 15% got them on time, according to the Commons Public Accounts Committee's assessment.

Speaking today, Liz said:

"These payments are vital for local farmers. It is unacceptable for DEFRA and the RPA to jeopardise their livelihoods by unnecessarily complicating the process."

"It is unfathomable that while Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland decided to stick to a simple payment scheme enabling them to meet their deadlines, DEFRA and the RPA chose to use a highly complicated payment method and entirely underestimated the scale of the job."

"As if farmers did not have enough to worry about in recent years, the payments debacle was entirely man-made and avoidable, yet left thousands on the brink of financial ruin, hardly leaving them in good stead for this year's bad weather and Foot and Mouth outbreak."

ENDS.

Notes to Editors:

'A series of simple errors and the failure to follow basic principles of project implementation' is estimated to have cost farmers between £18 million and £22.5 million in interest and arrangement fees on additional bank loans and increased short term borrowing on overdrafts.

The House of Commons Public Accounts Committee published a critical report of the payment scheme failures on the 18th July, available at http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200607/cmselect/cmpubacc/893/893.pdf