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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, how many Rural Payments Agency staff have been tasked with responding to telephone enquiries from farmers on the Basic Payments Scheme in each year since 2011-12.

All staff in the RPA contact centre deal with external calls covering every part of the agency’s business, including the Basic Payment Scheme introduced in 2015. The contact centre is made up of a core telephony team but additional operational resource is deployed on the telephone lines to meet demand during peak periods. The average number of people, shown in Full Time Equivalents, is given in the table below. Accurate figures before 2013 are not available.