It’s in the name of the department that gets to administer the scheme. If it’s NE administered, then farmers, as food producers are in for troubled times cause food does not feature.
Kind of depends I guess. The 'income foregone' element would obviously be an average over the entire country, so if your BPS payment is 90% of your profit as things stand, then your farming activities aren't making much profit anyway. So when BPS goes you'd have to go into ELMS to get any profit at all. Whereas Mr '4 tonnes an acre' would be making a decent margin even without BPS, so for him it would make sense keep farming the lot and ignore ELMS. The trick Defra have to pull off is to set the payment rates at a high enough level that allows the marginally profitable land to keep going, but not too high that everyone in the land puts every acre possible in because its a licence to print money.
It's always going to be verging on the impossible to come up with a scheme that works just right for the whole of England as it is so diverse. The trouble is whitehall seems incapable of running regional schemes let alone local ones.Kind of depends I guess. The 'income foregone' element would obviously be an average over the entire country, so if your BPS payment is 90% of your profit as things stand, then your farming activities aren't making much profit anyway. So when BPS goes you'd have to go into ELMS to get any profit at all. Whereas Mr '4 tonnes an acre' would be making a decent margin even without BPS, so for him it would make sense keep farming the lot and ignore ELMS. The trick Defra have to pull off is to set the payment rates at a high enough level that allows the marginally profitable land to keep going, but not too high that everyone in the land puts every acre possible in because its a licence to print money.
It's always going to be verging on the impossible to come up with a scheme that works just right for the whole of England as it is so diverse. The trouble is whitehall seems incapable of running regional schemes let alone local ones.
More money than sense, what an utter shambles these people are. Who has funded their costs so far? I think we all know the answer to that. They really must be held accountable for their actions but will probably just hide behind the charade that is Natural England.Oh dear, the original post and the fell pony grazing prosecution spoke of £15k costs.....
Natural England has just informed me that they have run up a prosecution cost bill of £250k so far in the Devon (css ended in 2012) case.
Deep pockets, fat cat lawyers and Natural England knows best.....
The other person in charge at the Post Office at the time was Tim Brooks, now top of the tree at the National Trust. Rather ironic don't you think?A finer example of the lesser spotted fffing idiot you could not wish to meet. Enough said.The country seems to be run, by an unaccountable bureaucracy, mostly QUANGOs and lead by a small coterie of left leaning people, who move through revolving doors when they change from one organisation to another, see Paula Vennells (ex post office head). Whenever they muck things up, they move on to another organisation with nothing usually being done, except for us the tax payer having to shoulder the bill. A national disgrace.
Oh dear, the original post and the fell pony grazing prosecution spoke of £15k costs.....
Natural England has just informed me that they have run up a prosecution cost bill of £250k so far in the Devon (css ended in 2012) case.
Deep pockets, fat cat lawyers and Natural England knows best.....
One wonders just what the full business case for that expenditure actually is?Was that a FoI request??
Ludicrous amounts of money being spent by these bodies. Madness.
Given that the total pot is less than the BPS pot in real terms ELMS can never be a license to print money. I cant for the life of me work out how Defra/Natural England will work out how to set payment rates for different options that are attractive enough yet don't bust the budget. For every ha that used an option which pays 5, 6, 7 times more per ha than BPS there needs to be 5, 6, 7ha of land elsewhere that take nothing from the pot. In the (probably unlikely) event that some options prove too popular, what mechanism would they have to deploy to keep total payments within budget? A competitive element or perhaps the retrospective cutting back of payment rates on options that are over subscribed?Kind of depends I guess. The 'income foregone' element would obviously be an average over the entire country, so if your BPS payment is 90% of your profit as things stand, then your farming activities aren't making much profit anyway. So when BPS goes you'd have to go into ELMS to get any profit at all. Whereas Mr '4 tonnes an acre' would be making a decent margin even without BPS, so for him it would make sense keep farming the lot and ignore ELMS. The trick Defra have to pull off is to set the payment rates at a high enough level that allows the marginally profitable land to keep going, but not too high that everyone in the land puts every acre possible in because its a licence to print money.
The problem is that its not their money they are wasting, if they had to find it out of their pocket it would be very differentOh dear, the original post and the fell pony grazing prosecution spoke of £15k costs.....
Natural England has just informed me that they have run up a prosecution cost bill of £250k so far in the Devon (css ended in 2012) case.
Deep pockets, fat cat lawyers and Natural England knows best.....
“Tim Parker?”wouldn’t want to muddy the wrong name!The other person in charge at the Post Office at the time was Tim Brooks, now top of the tree at the National Trust. Rather ironic don't you think?A finer example of the lesser spotted fffing idiot you could not wish to meet. Enough said.
Its the same con that the forestry commission has used for "compensation for turning good farmland into trees". Once you take the money and plant the trees they change the rules so that they no longer have to pay the compensation and you cannot get rid of the trees.
I wouldn’t plant large numbers of trees unless the payment was similar or greater than its freehold value. Why would you?
BB