Defra have confirmed that Countryside Stewardship (CS) Mid Tier agreement holders who claimed in 2017 for their revenue payment will receive a bridging payment by the end of June if they have not been paid by 21 June 2018.

 A bridging payment is an interest-free loan to customers in advance of their full year payment. Customers will receive 75% of the current estimated value of their CS 2017 revenue claim. When the full payment is processed and made, the amount paid through the bridging payment will be held back.  

While some 82% of 2017 CS claimants have already received a payment, bridging payments are being made to ensure that the remaining 18% of farmers and land managers are not left out of pocket for the work and time they have invested.

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Letters and emails are being sent to farmers and land managers awaiting payments this week, with a reminder to make sure bank account and contact details on the Rural Payments Service are up-to-date so that bridging payments can be made successfully.

The Rural Payments Agency (RPA) is administrating the payments on behalf of Natural England. This comes ahead of administration work on agri-environment schemes transferring to the RPA later this year.

The NFU has expressed concern over the announcement made today that only agreement holders since 2017 will be eligible for a bridging payment and say that all in agri-environment schemes – in HLS, ELS and CS Higher-Tier or Mid-Tier – who are owed payment should be eligible.

The announcement from Defra comes shortly after a strong call from NFU Council yesterday, which made the case for bridging payments for all schemes to the value of 75% of the annual payment. In addition, the NFU joined with CLA and TFA to send a letter to Secretary of State Michael Gove yesterday evening.

NFU Deputy President Guy Smith said: “On the face of it, this announcement shows that Defra is listening to the concerns of those agreement holders affected and it’s this sentiment we welcome.

“But to only solve the problem for a select few agreement holders, ignoring those in other HLS, ELS and CS Higher-Tier, is not acceptable. Agreement holders of any sort that are left waiting for payment should be eligible for a bridging payment. The principle is rather simple: if Defra accept the case that it’s not acceptable to expect agreement holders to wait any longer for money owed then that clearly applies to all those waiting not just a minority.

“We haven’t yet had any clarification on how they are going to deliver these bridging payments but what we hope to see is extra resource going in to Natural England to support this work. If we don’t see extra resource then I can’t foresee any decent progress being made in delivering the outstanding 25% of payment to agreement holders.

“It is clear that we need a long-term fix in the administration of the scheme; what we don’t want is one step forwards with this bridging payments announcement, but three steps back in the long-run.

“We still await news from Defra on establishing a rollover option for scheme renewals. We simply cannot let good environmental enhancement go to waste for lack of a functional scheme. We will continue to make the case for these options to Defra.”