At a time when prices for farmers' produce is falling, many welcome the support grants made by the Rural Payments Agency, meeting its end of December targets four weeks ahead of schedule.
The Agency paid out £1,370,328,624 to 96,669 SPS customers. This equates to 95 per cent of all SPS customers and 91.4 per cent of the total estimated fund value. The target was for 93 per cent of customers and 86 per cent of total estimated fund value to be paid out by 31 December.
Farmers in the South West received £280 million in Single Payment support grants, giving much needed support to many farm businesses in the region.
Mark Grimshaw, RPA Chief Executive, said: "This performance shows just how far we have come in our drive to become a trusted, efficient and effective organisation and I want to thank our people and our industry partners who worked so hard to achieve this outcome.
"It delivers on our Business Plan pledge to continue offering the best service possible to farmers by maintaining our high performance, whilst preparing to deliver on new CAP policies and a new rural payments system next year.
"If farmers want to be paid as early as possible next year, then I would urge them to register on the new rural payments online service as soon as invited to do so. That’s because for this, the first year of Basic Payment Scheme (BPS), there will be lots to do as we gather new information and ask farmers to check that the details we hold are still correct. Once all their details are correct on our new online service it will be a lot quicker to apply in future years."
