Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what progress has been made on (a) processing farmers' 2015 Basic Payment Scheme applications and (b) tackling the challenges of getting information supplied by farmers in paper form back onto an online validation process; and what resources have been committed to carry out this work to date.

Good progress is being made on processing Basic Payment Scheme 2015 applications including capturing changes that were made on the paper forms along with any new requirements of the scheme onto the Rural Payments IT system. We currently have access to around 800 people to perform this processing work.