Single Payment Scheme

: There is a catalogue of errors and misunderstandings, spanning a considerable time, leading up to the present fiasco with farm payments. Those errors range from applications being lost, to maps being woefully mismanaged. That left most farmers in England not being paid, whereas Scottish and Welsh farmers have been paid in full. The hybrid approach taken in England has proved unnecessarily complicated; it amalgamates historical payments based on those paid to individual farms in 2001–02, and is paid on a regional basis. In Wales and Scotland, a far simpler historical calculation has been used alone, meaning that farmers there have been paid in full, as I understand it. That has had the perverse effect of Scottish and Welsh farmers coming to auction marts in Thirsk and elsewhere in Yorkshire and outbidding English farmers, as they can pay more per animal on the back of their single farm payments. To compound the plight of the local farmer, most farmers in other EU countries have by now been paid the single farm payments in full.