Shropshire Star

Late basic payment applications allowed

Despite the Basic Payment Scheme (BPS) claim submission deadline of 15 June passing, late applications can still be submitted from 16 June until midnight on 10 July 2015.

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Any submissions will be subject to a penalty of one per cent per working day that the application is late. There are further penalties if the application includes national reserve or new and young farmer entitlements. This window also allows applicants to make changes to their already submitted claims.

DEFRA will now turn their attention to processing the claims already submitted and the complexity of the claim forms will present a range of approaches to dealing with obvious errors within the Rural Payments Agency.

Rural Surveyor Sarah Mallard of property consultants Bruton Knowles notes "we have urged the RPA to be as pragmatic as possible when processing the data submitted on the BP5 claim forms this year."

With the change in application process in England from online to paper, coupled with the multitude of guidance updates, the inevitable confusion around the rules of the new scheme, there will undoubtedly have been errors made on forms.

If payments are to be made from the opening of the payment window on 1 December 2015, as stated by DEFRA's Farming Minister George Eustice, the validation of claims by the RPA will need progress quickly. Sarah Mallard urges farmers to check their existing claims and if changes need to be made or farmers have inadvertently forgotten to submit their claims they should contact their agent or the RPA as soon as possible. This is important as the entitlements secured in 2015 will form the basis of future claims under this current period of the Common Agricultural Policy

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