Download or read book Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs and the Rural Payments Agency written by Great Britain. National Audit Office and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Streamlining Farm Oversight written by Great Britain: National Audit Office and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2012-12-12 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Department for Environment and Rural Affairs (Defra) has made some progress in following up the recommendations of the Farming Regulation Task Force, which called for a new approach to the culture of regulation. But farmers consider the rate of improvement continues to be slow. Eighty-four per cent of farmers surveyed believe oversight bodies should co-ordinate their activity more. The cost of complying with regulations is on average around a tenth of a farm's net profit. The NAO estimates that, during 2011-12, nine separate government bodies made at least 114,000 visits to English farms. More than half of these were to carry out disease surveillance and testing and 30 per cent to check for farmers' compliance, at a total cost of £47 million. The bodies inspecting farms often collect the same information separately and there is only limited sharing of intelligence which would help with the better targeting of resources. The current approach will not deliver the scale of change expected by the sector, and contrasts with the progress made in Scotland where oversight bodies have come together to identify redundant activity and cut one in six farm visits. Defra has not collected sufficient data to understand the scale, nature, and effectiveness of English farm oversight activity. It does not routinely collect or analyse data on the overall number and pattern of farm visits, or on levels of compliance across all regulatory regimes. Alternatives to physical inspections might be more widely adopted as a way of improving compliance.

Download or read book Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs departmental report 2007 written by Great Britain. Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2007-05-17 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dated May 2007

Download or read book Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs and Rural Payments Agency written by Great Britain. National Audit Office and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book A progress update in resolving the difficulties in administering the single payment scheme in England written by Great Britain: National Audit Office and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2007-12-12 with total page 42 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There was a report in October 2006 (HC 1631 2005-06) which looked at the problems in administering the 2005 single payments scheme in England. This report follows up by examining the progress made in resolving outstanding problems from 2005 and processing 2006 payments. It concludes that the new management team has instilled a clearer sense of direction and virtually all the outstanding 2005 payments were made by the end of December 2006. However the Agency has identified 34,499 cases where there might be errors in the original calculations and the review of most of these cases will be completed by the end of 2007. In the interim errors in payments in the first year were likely to have been repeated in the second year and the Agency was not able to administer the 2006 single payments scheme in a fully cost-effective manner.

Download or read book Rural Payments Agency Annual Report and Accounts 2003 04 written by Rural Payments Agency and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the third annual report of the Rural Payments Agency, an executive agency of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA). It is the single paying agency responsible for CAP (Common Agriculture Policy) schemes in England and certain schemes throughout the UK. This report covers the period 2003-04, during which time the merger took place between the Rural Payments Agency and the British Cattle Movement Service (BCMS), CAP reform regulation was published by the EU, the agency was awarded ISO 9001:2000 quality standard for full range of services to the rural community, and the agency met all but one of its key performance targets.

Download or read book Geographic information strategy written by Great Britain: National Audit Office and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2011-07-13 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has delivered some value from the £39.3 million spent on its geographic information strategy and activities. However, the Department has not tracked the full cost of geographic information and systems to it or its arm's length bodies, or systematically measured benefits. The Department has been able to identify savings of only approximately £9 million. The figures for costs and benefits are both likely to be underestimates. This lack of financial information means that the NAO cannot determine that value for money has been achieved. Geographic information is a vital resource used by the Department and its arm's length bodies for a wide range of activities including policy making, decision making, day-to-day operations and keeping the public informed. However, neither the original strategy, nor the updated 2009 version, set business targets for cost reduction or quantified the benefits that could be achieved by collaboration or by sharing geographic information and systems. The aim of the strategy is to share geographic information between the Department and its arm's length bodies, as well as make best use of geographic information systems. The Department has had some success in delivering these services, but has not quantified the costs and benefits of geographic information and systems in all its arm's length bodies. Although the Department has put in place appropriate technical governance, strategic governance arrangements could be strengthened. The Department and its arm's length bodies have a good level of specialist skills, but these skills could be better integrated into the business so that the benefits of geographic information are fully realised across the Department.

Download or read book HC 1143 CAP Payments to Farmers written by Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2015 with total page 4 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On 19 March the Rural Payments Agency (RPA) announced an abrupt change of policy on how farmers must make Basic Payment Scheme (BPS) applications under the new Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) introduced this year. Reversing the firm stance taken by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and the RPA that applications must be made online only: claims are now to be submitted on paper. On 25 March, the Committee took oral evidence from Defra's Secretary of State, the Rt Hon Elizabeth Truss MP, and the RPA Chief Executive, Mark Grimshaw, asking both to explain the reasons for this sudden U turn and to identify its implications for farmers and the public purse. With the dissolution of Parliament imminent, this report sets out our immediate conclusions and identifies a number of questions which must be addressed by Defra and the RPA as a matter of urgency.

Download or read book The Rural Payments Agency and the implementation of the Single Payment Scheme written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2007-03-29 with total page 74 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The EU Single Payment Scheme replaced 11 previous subsidies to farmers based on agricultural production with one payment for land management. The European Commission gave some discretion to Member States over how to implement the scheme, and the Rural Payments Agency (RPA), which is responsible for administering the scheme in England, opted for the dynamic hybrid model which incorporates elements of previous entitlement and new regionalised area payments based on a flat rate per hectare. A NAO report (HCP 1631, session 2005-06, ISBN 9780102943399), published in October 2006, found that the RPA underestimated the risks and complexities involved in implementing the hybrid model, and the IT system was never tested as a whole before the scheme was introduced. It failed to adequately pilot land registration, and underestimated the amount of work involved in both mapping the land and processing each claim, having to rely on often inexperienced temporary and agency staff to clear the backlog. The difficulties were not picked up early enough, neither by the RPA nor Defra, for corrective action to be taken in time, resulting in the RPA's failure to meet its own payment targets. Delayed payments have cost farmers money in additional interest and bank charges, and caused distress to a significant minority of farmers, particularly hill farmers. The cost of implementing the scheme was budgeted at £76 million but rose to £122 million by March 2006, with further cost increases likely. Following on from a previous Committee report on the RPA (HCP 840, session 2005-06, ISBN 9780215027115), published in January 2006 and in light of the NAO findings, this report focuses on aspects of policy decision-making and political accountability raised by the problems with the Single Payment Scheme. The Committee concludes the Scheme has been a catastrophe for some farmers and a serious and embarrassing failure for Defra and the RPA, and Defra's fundamental failure to carry out one of its core tasks (that is to pay farmers their financial entitlements on time) differentiates this issue from the myriad of botched Government IT projects. There is a need for greater expertise within government in the delivery of such complex IT projects, and the report also criticises the quality of advice given by the Office of Government Commerce and the IT system designed by Accenture as the principal IT contractor. Defra determined the policies which it required the RPA to implement and Defra leadership was at fault for accepting RPA statements that implementing the complex hybrid model to deadline was "do-able". The Committee argues that responsibility for this failure goes wider than the dismissal of the RPA chief executive, and ministers and senior Defra officials should also be held to account, particularly Margaret Beckett (the then Defra Secretary of State), Sir Brian Bender, (the former Defra Permanent Secretary) and Andy Lebrecht (the Director General for Sustainable Farming, Food and Fisheries). It concludes that a departmental failure as serious as this should result in the removal from office of those responsible for faulty policy design and implementation, and it recommends that new guidance on Ministerial accountability is needed in the event of such serious departmental failure.

Download or read book Defra s Organic Agri environment Scheme written by Great Britain: National Audit Office and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2010 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and Natural England have not optimised value for money for the almost £200 million scheme to encourage farmers into organic farming and deliver environmental benefits. The Organic Entry Level Stewardship uses EU money and matched funding from UK taxpayers. Defra's forecasts for expenditure of EU funds assumed a constant rate of take-up each year, which the NAO considers over-optimistic, and present a risk that EU funds will not all be utilised. The scheme pays organic farmers for managing their land in ways that will protect or enhance the natural environment or historic landscape. The scheme is likely to have achieved environmental benefits by supporting organic farming, and the money paid to farmers for adopting environmental land management measures has had some impact, but this could be increased. Farmers can choose which environmental measures to implement and, according to the NAO survey, 57 per cent chose some measures that involve managing features already in place on their farm. Many of the more challenging options are rarely implemented. Defra is now taking steps to improve the environmental impact of the scheme by promoting better targeted measures. Take-up of the scheme broadly reflects take-up of organic farming methods in the farming industry as a whole. The scheme benefits larger farms, especially in the beef and dairy sectors, more than smaller farms.

Download or read book Managing front line delivery costs written by Great Britain: National Audit Office and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2011-07-22 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs needs to scrutinise and challenge its arm's length bodies so that it can oversee cost reductions with minimal disruption to frontline services, according to this report from the National Audit Office. Those bodies understand their own costs reasonably well, but the Department still has more to do to achieve the full understanding of the relationships between cost, outputs and outcomes needed to be confident that it is securing value for money. The Department gives the bodies considerable operational autonomy. It has begun to develop ways of more systematically collecting high level financial management information from the bodies and has now rolled out a standard template for collecting financial management data. As the template focuses on the monitoring of expenditure against high level budgets it does not show whether the full costs of frontline activities are accurately measured and well managed. This study uses four of the Department's larger delivery bodies as case studies. The report notes that the Department has few indicators to assess whether the costs of activities in these bodies are high or low. All four of the bodies that the NAO examined have started to assess costs against internal benchmarks. However, Defra has not requested this data. Arm's length bodies have struggled to identify external cost benchmarks. The Department does not have comparable information about the unit costs of front-line work and has not asked arm's length bodies to explain the basis of their cost calculations.

Download or read book More cold comfort written by Great Britain: Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2011-11-30 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Parliamentary Ombudsman, Ann Abraham, has upheld complaints from nine farmers about the Government's handling of a subsidy scheme which caused them to miss out on payments they were entitled to. The farmers complained to the Ombudsman about the administration of the Single Payment Scheme (SPS) in 2005 and 2006 by the Rural Payments Agency (RPA), part of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), The SPS is the latest generation of the EU schemes intended, among other policy aims, to give farmers direct income support. The farmers complained about RPA's handling of their claims to the SPS on a number of counts, including that they provided poor quality and sometimes ambiguous guidance on how to make a claim; failed to return applicants' telephone calls when this had been promised; misdirected applicants about the status of their cases; delayed letting applicants know that they would not be paid; and did not explain their decisions properly. RPA also failed to consider the effects their errors and omissions had on the farmers when they came to complain. In one case, a farmer misunderstood the new form and only claimed a subsidy for the year 2005. She did not activate her claim and subsequently did not receive a payment. No one questioned her mistake, even though RPA knew this was a common error by farmers. Losing a payment of over £13,000 left the farmer unable to pay all her bills and reliant on her partner's goodwill. She found out her mistake almost a year after submitting her claim, when she asked what had happened to her payment. Another farmer also misunderstood the new form and guidance and did not activate his claim. He was then led to believe by the RPA that he would be paid, which was not the case. He and his wife found the confusion and uncertainty of their circumstances particularly stressful. The farmer had to increase his overdraft, sell land and take on extra part time work in order to meet the financial shortfall. As a result of the Ombudsman's investigation the farmers will each receive a written apology from the Permanent Secretary of Defra and compensation of £500 for the inconvenience, distress and frustration that they experienced. They will also receive individual payments to put right the financial impact of RPA's failures. In addition, the Ombudsman has also asked RPA to provide an action plan setting out the changes they have made to prevent other farmers experiencing the same problems in future.

Download or read book Management of expenditure written by Great Britain: National Audit Office and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2008-03-06 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Holding managers to account for the resources they have been allocated is key to improving financial management at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. This need has been recognised by the Department and reflected in a programme to improve its financial management, but the Department's Management Board recognises that establishing a culture of tighter control over its expenditure will take time. This initiative must remain a top priority and managers throughout the organisation will need to produce more reliable estimates of costs to justify their bids for resources and track the cost effectiveness of work done. The budgets agreed by the Management Board at the outset of 2006-07 and 2007-08 exceeded the funds available. In early 2006-07, increased spending to remedy difficulties with the Single Payment Scheme led to a risk of overspending in that year and the Department instigated a review which identified savings of £170 million against its original budget of £3,854 million. During the early part of 2007-08 further commitments above the agreed budget allocations meant the Department was at risk of exceeding its spending limit by £140 million. In July 2007, the Management Board identified savings which partially balanced the budget and continues to work towards a balanced budget for the year end. Effective monitoring by the Management Board and greater integration between the systems for monitoring performance delivery and financial expenditure would help better management of budgets. The NAO recommends that the Management Board set budgets from 2008-09 onwards that balance with the 2007 Comprehensive Spending Review and develops benchmarks to test the rigour of proposed budgets and to provide confirmation that these resource bids accord with the Department's strategic objectives.

Download or read book Rural Payments Agency written by Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee and published by . This book was released on 2012-07-18 with total page 20 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Rural Payments Agency written by Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 9 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Government reply to the Committee's 6th report, session 2002-03 (HCP 382, ISBN 0215010086)

Download or read book The Rural Payments Agency and the Implementation of the Single Payment Scheme written by Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 12 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book HC 443 Defra performance in 2014 15 written by Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2015 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Defra's budget for day-to-day spending is to be cut by 15% over the next four years. This will be difficult to achieve since total budget reductions of about a quarter during the last Parliament have already identified easily achievable savings and removed the more obvious inefficiencies across the Defra family. Defra is one of the smaller government departments, with Exchequer funding of just over £2 billion, but it performs vital functions. We endorse the Defra Secretary of State's vision for a world-class food and farming sector, a robust rural economy and an enhanced natural environment. Managing environmental and rural economy issues together can help deliver that vision but this, together with meeting the challenges of protecting the UK from natural hazards, requires adequate resources. Protecting the nation against, for example, flood and animal or plant diseases carries multi-million pound costs; the costs to the economy, society and the environment of not doing so may, however, be even greater. The challenges facing Defra are first whether the reduced budget available to it is sufficient for its task, and second how to make the correct policy choices so as to allocate smaller funds effectively.