Single Farm Payment Penalties Revealed In Parliamentary Answer To Stevenson

A Parliamentary Question tabled by Banff & Buchan MSP Stewart Stevenson has revealed that nearly 700 Single Farm Payment claimants in 2005 and 2006 had penalties totalling over £1¼ million applied to their claims due to errors found within the completed forms.

The Scottish National Party MSP questioned Rural Development Minister Ross Finnie and is now calling for advice to be made available to farmers based on an analysis of the most common errors, and for more to be done to avoid SFP claims reaching the stage where penalties are applied.

Banff & Buchan MSP Stewart Stevenson said:

“In the context of the overall numbers involved, this may not seem like a large problem, but I know from my mailbag that it is an extremely serious problem if you are one of the claimants found to have made an error.

“The ramifications and knock-on effects for the farm business can be substantial and are in many cases entirely avoidable if a helping hand was available from officialdom.

“I believe that more could and should be done to reduce still further the number of claims which have penatlies applied and I have asked the Minister to review the handling of such claims to ensure that more claimants can be given appropriate advice where a genuine error is detected in the claims process.”

Shadow Minister for Rural Development and Moray MSP Richard Lochhead added:

“It is clear from cases that I and other MSPs have come across that the vast majority if not all of these penalties were incurred as a result of innocent errors rather than fraud.

“These figures that illustrate just how much cash has been removed from the businesses of hard-pressed farmers vindicate the campaign for the European Union to relax the regulations to allow civil servants to differentiate between fraud and innocent errors. The punishments appear to be completely disproportionate to the offences.”