Rural Payments Agency: Basic Payment Scheme

Debate between Geoffrey Clifton-Brown and George Eustice

Tuesday 24th March 2015 Commons Chamber

[George Eustice]

My hon. Friend makes a good point; the Labour party did not grip the problems with the RPA, so there was over £600 million of disallowance and farmers were often paid over a year late—as he said, only 15% were paid on time.

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con)]

I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I, too, congratulate my hon. Friend the Minister. At least farmers now have certainty and know that they can apply and that they will receive their payments, but can he give an utmost assurance that he will do everything he can to ensure that this delay in applications will not result in any delay in payments?

[George Eustice]

Yes, I can give my hon. Friend that assurance. We will be seeking to ensure that the claims are processed as quickly as possible and paid as speedily as we have demonstrated our ability to do in recent years.

Common Agricultural Policy

Debate between Geoffrey Clifton-Brown and George Eustice

Monday 7th July 2014 Commons Chamber

[George Eustice]

Well, I think there was quite a degree of consensus. I suppose we have to recognise that the last Government gave up a chunk of our rebate supposedly in order to get CAP reform, but that did not work either. I want to stay on the substance of the issue before us this evening, however.

In terms of applying this basic approach of keeping the pillar one payments as simple as possible, when it came to greening we were clear we wanted to have the flexibility to allow farmers, for instance, to use hedges to count towards their environmental focus areas.

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

The inclusion of hedgerows as being eligible for pillar two payments is one of the Government’s successes. On that point, while many areas of the country have hedgerows as field boundaries, there are other areas, such as the Cotswolds, that have stone walls as field boundaries. May I ask him to press the Commission hard that those sorts of landscape features should also be included for payment?

[George Eustice]

There were serious administrative difficulties in terms of allowing hedgerows and all landscape features to count towards the environmental focus area, because each one has to be mapped, and we took the decision in the end that hedgerows were so important to many parts of the country that in the first year we should include those hedgerows and endeavour to get the mapping done, and where it could not be done in year one—we have three years to complete the mapping— farmers would self-declare the hedgerows. We do not rule out adding things like stone walls in years two or three, once we have got hedgerows in place. The task of mapping every single individual feature on every farm is an enormous one, however, and we therefore wanted to start first with hedges, before moving on to things such as dry stone walls.