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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, how many inaccurate Common Agricultural Policy payments were made to farmers in (a) St Helens North, (b) Merseyside and (c) the UK in each year since 2010.

The Rural Payments Agency (RPA) said it would investigate Basic Payment Scheme (BPS) 2015 claims where there’s a discrepancy between the claim information and that held on the Rural Payments service, through a planned payment reconciliation process. This started after the BPS 2016 application window closed and looked at an initial stock of 13,600 claims for England.

Of these claims, 14 related to farmers in St Helens and 41 in Merseyside. The RPA does not hold this information for the UK. The agency will continue to investigate new queries which customers raise and make any top-up payments due.

No comparable data is available for the previous scheme which ran between 2005 and 2014.