Government Won’t Force Farmers in England into Online-Only Land.. Yet

The UK Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and the Rural Payments Agency (RPA) appears to have delayed a long-planned strategy that would have effectively forced farmers in remote rural parts of England to go online, which is despite a lack of good broadband connectivity and IT skills among some in the community.

Admittedly Ofcom may frequently claim that 99.9% of the country should be able to access a bog standard sub-2Mbps fixed line broadband service (not to mention Satellite), although as most people know the reality away from optimistic estimation is usually somewhat more challenging and quite a few remote communities do still struggle to get a stable fixed line connection.

Never the less the Government’s related “Digital by Default” strategy, which among other things seeks to save money by taking some services online-only, has continued to move forward despite concerns that not everybody was connected yet (many millions of people still don’t use the Internet, albeit usually linked to age or disability).

One aspect of this strategy involved forcing rural farmers in England to submit Basic Payment Scheme and other applications online, although in a surprise announcement this will now be reverted to a manual paper-based submission system. Coincidentally, perhaps, this has occurred just before the General Election. The blame is being put down to gremlins in the system.

Mark Grimshaw, CEO of the RPA, said (Farmers Guardian):

“We were expecting a significant release of functionality over the weekend. The release did not go well. The portal has been down for all activity this week. We have taken the decision to suspend activity of the portal. We are closing the mapping functionality for general users. We do not now need customers to make online changes to their maps.

We have recognised the pressure the industry is under so we have decided to go back a year to allow customers to get their applications in. We have gone back to what we know works which is good old paper.”

As a result farmers will, effective from Monday, be able to get blank paper forms for submitting their applications. Farmers will then be able to submit their claim by email, post or through one of 50 RPA drop-in centres. Apparently the EU deadline for some of these forms may also be extended to June 2015.