No Improvement in Cross Compliance Breaches

The RPA has released its cross compliance statistics for 2012, a little later than usual.  Perhaps rather disappointingly the number of failures remains similar to the previous year; 1,947 in 2012 compared to 2,046 in 2011.  The usual suspects also continue to cause problems.  SMR 7 (Cattle ID and Registration) still sees the highest failure rate, but there has been significant improvement.  Other areas have seen a large increase in non-compliance, particularly SMR4 (NVZs), GAEC 14 (Protection of Hedgerows and Watercourses) and GAEC 1 (Soil Protection Review).  The table below compares some of the main areas of non-compliance found in 2012 compared to 2011;

Source: RPA

According to the RPA, SMR 4 failures in many cases were due to the farmer not being able to produce any correct records at all.  In other cases there was just not enough information.  Common areas included, no records of a manure storage calculation, fertiliser plan, nutrient managemant plan and/or risk map.  Temporary field heaps were located in the same area for over 12 months and too close to watercourses, not enough slurry storage, and organicmanure had been spread within 10m of a watercourse or 50m of a borehole.  This is the first year the RPA has taken over NVZ inspections, previously the Environment Agency (EA) carried them out.  The EA had been a bit lenient as the rules came into force, but it appears the RPA are being a lot stricter.

With regards to GAEC 14, the most common errors were Protection Zones found not to be of the correct width (2m from the centre of a hedgerow, watercourse or field ditch).  In the case of GAEC 1, in many cases the farmer had not completed a Soil Protection Review (SPR) 2010 at all, identifying the soil types and soil managment issues on the farm.  In other cases, the SPR was not kept up to date including identifying when waterlogged soil had been accessed. – a topical issue over the last year.

The total number of Single Payment Scheme claims which were reduced because of cross compliance failures in 2012 was 1,501 compared to 1,700 in 2011.  A further 95 claimants received a warning letter (158 in 2011).  Of the 1,501 claims reduced, 554, saw a 3% reduction, 458 had their claim reduced by 5% and 13 did not receive their 2012 claim at all, with a further 5 having their claim rejected because they refused an inspection.  The full statistics will be available shortly at http://rpa.defra.gov.uk/rpa/index.nsf/UIMenu/9B27CED347D543A58025721B003EC086?Opendocument