BPS 2017 help thread

DrWazzock said:

Looked at this years maps as its raining.

2 roadside verges now down as land parcels of permanent pasture. Maybe we'll go back to tethering the cattle on them.
A watercourse and its sloping banks now defined as an extremely long and thin arable land parcel. Watercress????
A bit fenced off in the corner of a grass field as a sheep pen redefined as separate arable land parcel.
Some field areas now bigger than we or the "ministry man" have ever measured them on the ground or with mapping magic or with the sprayer.

Why, when and how did this happen? First I have heard of it.

Wasn't it a bit unwise to make changes unilaterally without any consultation with landowners?

This on top of last years application being deemed non compliant for reasons unknown.

Difficult to know where to start as RPA seem completely incommunicado and unable to provide any evidence of why last years claim was non compliant.

I'll probably just bang this years application in ignoring the spurious land parcels. We don't have the entitlements to cover them anyway.

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After the cock-up last year when a field was declared ineligible, eventually it was sorted, by I assume remote sensing, but the sloping banks on a riverside have now been declared as permanent pasture. Admittedly there is no gorse etc so it could be grazed, if the beasts had a good sense of balance and didn't fall in the water and drown.
As I'm not claiming on that area anyway, I couldn't be bothered to correct it, as the rest of the field was correct and I got paid!

Our missing field in 2015 was eventually reinstated and RPA paid up. But this correction was not carried forward to 2016, which is still short on Entitlements / payment. As will be 2017.

Have you seen this other thread,

Swift action required on RPA incorrect BPS land parcel mergers

Ramrod said:

Have you seen this other thread,

Swift action required on RPA incorrect BPS land parcel mergers

Click to expand...

RPA don't do 'swift'. In fact they don't appear to do joined up thinking and they don't answer signed for letters or act on telephone calls. The only person who got our 2015 claim sorted was our MP. But that correction has not been carried forward.
Yes I've seen the thread. Ours wasn't a merger. The parcel was swiped and added to the National Reserve, then they lied to our MP about its land use code. Until I forwarded their own dated download information.

Yes, we have uncorrected 2015 mapping errors, and associated payment errors, and entitlement transfer errors not sorted out.

What worries me is are they're trying to carry problems forward until they possibly don't exist post Brexit

What worries me is that they have apparently dedicated advisers for agents with over ten farmers with issues, but apart from saying "hello" to my agent, apparently is not returning calls or emails! I have no confidence in getting any money in a timely fashion. And they do this every year with no consequence - just add another "mapping layer" to mess up.

Almost getting tired of checking my claim status online, the faint hope of payment landing before rent day is dwindling fast

static said:

Yes, we have uncorrected 2015 mapping errors, and associated payment errors, and entitlement transfer errors not sorted out.

Click to expand...

It's clearly time that the RPA had the same treatment, but in reverse, that MAFF had in 2001. They are very clearly not fit for purpose and appear to now be trying to hide their mistakes and failings.

I wonder who they think their "stakeholders" actually are? Clearly not farmers.

Perhaps these RPA threads should be actively shared with the Commons Agriculture Select Committee?

holwellcourtfarm said:

It's clearly time that the RPA had the same treatment, but in reverse, that MAFF had in 2001. They are very clearly not fit for purpose and appear to now be trying to hide their mistakes and failings.

I wonder who they think their "stakeholders" actually are? Clearly not farmers.

Perhaps these RPA threads should be actively shared with the Commons Agriculture Select Committee?

Click to expand...

Don't think they'll worry to much about us claimants, but they may try and take even more money in fines from the UK, because they can

"Not fit for purpose" is the new BS excuse to spend money on outside consultants to convince them to buy more IT - probably from their mates / spouses / other firms they consult for. Like disabled applying for maintainence money / child refugees, they will only take notice once we start acutally start dying or topping ourselves.

Well they have processed one of the 2 corrections I sent them 10 days ago, reversing an incorrect change they had made.

They didn't even send an acknowledgement of the RLE1s though as they commit to doing.

My other change was a new permanent split of fields so I wonder if that will actually be done at all this year?

matthew said:

RPA don't do 'swift'. In fact they don't appear to do joined up thinking and they don't answer signed for letters or act on telephone calls. The only person who got our 2015 claim sorted was our MP. But that correction has not been carried forward.
Yes I've seen the thread. Ours wasn't a merger. The parcel was swiped and added to the National Reserve, then they lied to our MP about its land use code. Until I forwarded their own dated download information.

Click to expand...

Excuse me for trying to help !!!

Ramrod said:

Excuse me for trying to help !!!

Click to expand...

No problem. I didn't think that Fred was appropriate to our problem, but had 'liked' one post.
I've scrolled all the replies again this morning and RPA seem in more of a muddle than ever with mapping.

Sorry if my reply came over as sharp.

[QUOTE="Adeptandy, post: 3624554, member: 23502"]Almost getting tired of checking my claim status online, the faint hope of payment landing before rent day is dwindling fast [/QUOTE]

Me too!

What does the status say on yours? Mine has gone from "Validation" to "Final Checking". I think it has to move to "Preparing for Payment" before it gets paid, which is always on a Thursday, to land in your bank account the following Monday.

I suspect that those whose status still say "Validation" at this stage will be paid 75% at the end of March. In fact,I am convinced that this is what RPA are working towards right now. Hence not dealing with any other problems until that is done.

RPA seriously cocked up with us. They told me that we should expect full payment 2 weeks ago yesterday. When it didn't arrive, I got hold of my case worker, who agreed that under the circumstances, they would dig out our claim and deal with it urgently. The problem is that some fields have not been assigned a GIS status (arable, grass, woodland, etc). It is all to do with the fact that a satellite could not see a field, due to clouds I presume.

What I want to know is why they can't use the most recent or even historic Google Earth maps to confirm that a field is what we say it is on our forms? If it has tramlines, it must be arable FFS!


RPA are still holding up our NE Mid Tier Stewardship for exactly the same reason. I did some work on assessing how much seed we need to order for MTS yesterday. To do so, I dug out our 2016 claim form to check the latest field size areas. It dawned on me that many of the problems RPA are having still relate back to the computer software issues that stopped all online applications in 2015.

This was partly due to the fact that under the old SPS system, you had to remove all track-ways from the farmed area of a field. Whereas under the BPS scheme you may claim the tracks if they are soil or grass, but not if they are stoned or hard. What the idiots did was to assume all tracks are claimable, which often means you could claim a larger eligible area that the field shows is eligible! The form actually encourages you to do this!

Why couldn't they have left it as it was and let us as farmers or agents show whether or not these tracks are claimable or not?

It seems to me that every time the EU does one of its major reviews and changes the system, some bright spark thinks that it can be made so much easier by inventing a major new computer software system that can take information from the previous system and adapt it to the new one. No it can't! It is far too complicated to account for every situation to expect a software program to deal with every eventuality.

Every time they make these changes, the time taken to resolve the issues gets longer and longer. In this case, I doubt whether they will get resolved before another review is due.

Thank God we will soon be out of it. Perhaps we can invent a system that doesn't need dramatically altering every 5 years, if at all.

Two Tone said:

Thank God we will soon be out of it. Perhaps we can invent a system that doesn't need dramatically altering every 5 years, if at all.

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Flat rate per acre. Paid direct to whoever is registered owner as per RLR. Mapping changes can only be done in person, face-to-face. All stewardship schemes checked anually by real person who comes to farm with RPA / NE cheque and gives you it if you pass.

static said:

Flat rate per acre. Paid direct to whoever is registered owner as per RLR. Mapping changes can only be done in person, face-to-face. All stewardship schemes checked anually by real person who comes to farm with RPA / NE cheque and gives you it if you pass.

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Agreed,

Except for the payment to be made to the "Farmer" not owner. I.e. the person taking the "Risk" in the same way as HMRC view a Farmer, as opposed to a Landlord, when it comes to IHT relief.

Fine. Then only the "farmer" can hold land on the RLR. Problem solved.

Still at Claim Validation, in 3 days it will be the anniversary of my 2016 BPS submission........wonder if they'll send me a card

Edit, just had another look, still at Claim validation and its the anniversary today, I'll await the post with anticipation

The most frustrating thing is that we haven't had a single meaningful reply to any of our queries over the last 2 months. All we get are automated replies thanking us for our enquiries.

And while issues remain unresolved from last year we cannot proceed with this year's application with any confidence.

For us the RPA performance during his past 12 months is the worst we have seen.