Margaret Beckett's neck on the line
Margaret Beckett’s neck is apparently on the line because of her failure to ensure payments to farmers have been made. It seems that the Government’s processes are a year behind the rest of the EU. Ms. Beckett’s highly spun response is to say that payments should be “deployed as soon as it is operationally possible to do so.”
I am concerned about this because that phrase suggests a future position is possible using the excuse that “it was not operationally possible to do so.”
New Labour has let farmers down time and time again; at the same time they have shown that farming is just not important to them. I hope this story gets the National coverage it deserves and, at the very least, exposes the many failings there are in DEFRA and in the current Secretary of State’s management.
I am concerned about this because that phrase suggests a future position is possible using the excuse that “it was not operationally possible to do so.”
New Labour has let farmers down time and time again; at the same time they have shown that farming is just not important to them. I hope this story gets the National coverage it deserves and, at the very least, exposes the many failings there are in DEFRA and in the current Secretary of State’s management.
posted by Martin Curtis at 9:08 PM
3 Comments:
I thought your party wanted to abolish the CAP. Syurely you should be demanding the money is never paid? Or was the claim about the CAP just a piece of, errr, spin?
Over the last 4 weeks it appears that the RPA has managed to process about 1,100 claims per working day. There are still 73,000 outstanding payments to be made and 52 working days until the end of June. On the figures so far this requires an increase in productivity of around 24% in order to make the deadline. This is a very tall order for the RPA, considering that the Farming Online survey suggests that there is still a very large proportion of unvalidated claims to reconcile, as only 7% of those that had received an Un-valdated form have since had this validated.
The situation is worse than people realise, under the present method of validation, it would take up until Bonfire Night for all payments to be made. What confidence can we have in a new system being better?
Please read my blog for more details about this.
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