Single Payment Scheme

I shall try to keep my remarks as brief as I can. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Vale of York (Miss McIntosh) on securing this excellent and important debate. I remind the House of my entry in the Register of Members' Interests. I am a partner in a farming business, which, incidentally, received a letter of entitlement indicating that we farm 90 hectares more than we do. As a consequence, we are in the category of the unvalidated—or the great unwashed. I deeply regret that we are having to have this debate at all. I shall not dwell on the reasons for the chaos in the Rural Payments Agency, because they have been well catalogued by other hon. Members. I should like to touch on the scale of the complexity and the numbers from the perspective of my constituency. We are told by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs that there are 120,000 farms in England. I think that it means 120,000 holdings, and there is a difference between farms and holdings, which may in part explain the confusion about numbers. I am led to believe that only 68,000 of those farms are more than 20 hectares. Some Labour Members have referred to the fact that farms below that level are, in many cases, hobby farms, although there are some specialist farmers who farm small acreages. It is the larger farmers for whom the payments are so critical to the viability of their business. There is a business in my constituency, Farming Online, which maintains a database of about 35,000 mostly larger, arable farms. Its director, Peter Griffith, told me when I was preparing for this debate that the survey he has conducted through Farming Online's website indicates that, of 2,210 respondents as of this morning, only 140 have been paid their single farm payments—a mere 6.3 per cent. of respondents. That compares with the Government's statistic, in the Library briefing, that 32.5 per cent. of farmers have been dealt with correctly. There is an enormous discrepancy between those numbers. An even more startling figure is that, of those who replied to the survey, 86 per cent. have received unvalidated entitlement letters. The chaos in the Rural Payments Agency is apparent to all of us from constituency cases. I shall illustrate a couple that have come to my attention. At a meeting of the National Farmers Union West Midlands last night, DEFRA was considered as much a part of the problem as the RPA. Previously, a farmer could at least rely on being dealt with by one case officer at DEFRA or its predecessor, the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Fisheries, however unhelpful they may have been, but now, papers get shuffled from one office to another—in the case of one of my constituents, from Crewe to Reading to Exeter. No individual case officer is responsible, so no one takes responsibility for a case, and there is no telephone line to follow it up.