10th February 2015
Hopefully by the time you read this, your SP5 will have been safely lodged with the RPA. However you still have until the 31st May to make amendments without incurring any penalty, and up to the 9th June with a 1% penalty for every day beyond the 15th May. It should be noted that once the RPA have notified you of any mistake or an inspection has been arranged, or mistakes are found by Natural England or the Forestry Commission when cross-checking the SP5 information, it will be too late to make any amendments. Therefore if you have rushed your application by the 15th May, it is still worth taking the time to check through everything again.
If you have not submitted your SP5 by today, likewise you can still submit a claim up to the 9th June, but again there will be the 1% penalty per day for being late.
Better late than never, and bearing in mind the above, some recent issues we have come across are as follows:
1. In the 2013 Handbook it states “in some circumstances woodland, if it is being grazed (including pannage) is considered to be eligible.” This seems to indicate that pigs in woods are acceptable, however we have discovered that internal advice to RPA inspectors is that such an area would not qualify. Debate also continues with inspectors as to what forage should be available to stock when grazing woodland. Does it have to be grass, or can it be other herbage or flora?
2. The 2013 Handbook also provides new notes about fencing alongside hedges. It appears that if a fence is less than 3m from the centre of the hedge, in order that the hedge can be easily accessed for cutting, allowing the fence to be easily repaired and not overgrown, the area between the fence and the centre of the hedge can be considered to be eligible in certain circumstances, if it also has an environmental benefit. This has helped clarify the scenario whereby otherwise the RPA will consider a fence line the boundary of the field (a single strand of barbed wire is not relevant though), and not the middle of the hedge. The difficulty is that many landowners still rely on the original IACS plans and have not looked closely enough at their field boundaries. Only last week we had a call from someone who had overlooked excluding such areas beyond the fence line from their eligible claim, which would have gone back to 2005. That farmer now runs the risk, if inspected, of having entitlements confiscated and recovery of SPS payments going back to 2005.
3. Considerable areas of ineligible land are still being included where proper measurements of ditches alongside hedges have not been taken into account. This is complicated by overhanging hedges, but it is disturbing as to how much these small ribbons of ineligible land add up to.
One does wonders sometimes where the UK’s interpretation of the Scheme will end up! A typical Devon 130 acre stock holding will take on average eight hours to inspect in order to calculate eligible area and measure up any mapping changes etc. We find there is always land that should not have been claimed on, and always all too real problems that have not been considered before. This is an expensive exercise, but what is the alternative to ensure one’s payments are safe? Many will employ “advisors” who will either fill in the paperwork asking for a disclaimer without visiting the farm, or visit the farms and submit the form, but will only be charging a couple of hundred pounds. In fact this arrangement is probably the norm. We surveyed a farm last week where a farmer had previously used an advisor who had charged £200 every year. Two of our surveyors took nine hours to go around the farm, and at the date of writing we are still going through numerous glaring errors, where there has been no reduction from the original IACS plans for woodland, scrub, waterways, ditches, unmapped new boundaries, land let out and in, etc.
