On Tuesday, the Rural Payments Agency (RPA) announced it would be fast tracking funds to farmers who have yet to receive their direct payments for last year. The Payments Agency acknowledged that 10 percent of eligible claimants have yet to receive their 2015 BPS payments.

This means that 9,000 farmers could still be waiting for their BPS payments at the end of the month.

Speaking at the NFU Council in Kenilworth, RPA chief executive Mark Grimshaw said cases for which payment is still outstanding are proving more difficult to process than had been anticipated – because of the complications caused by a new inspection regime and changes to how commons applications are processed. The RPA chief exec said inspections relating to greening requirements, including Ecological Focus Areas, are partly responsible for the delays, and reiterated that common land claims have taken longer to process due to changes in the subsidy scheme.

Grimshaw said that - as there are 10% of payments left to make - the agency can now offer part payments to claimants still waiting for their BPS funds. These bridging payments (worth around half of farmers’ claim value) will be made by the end of April. However, the NFU has called for greater clarity on when the remaining funds will be paid out, and why part payments weren’t made before, when RPA missed earlier payment targets.

On Wednesday, The RPA chief executive commented,  “We know how important these payments are for farmers and our priority has always been to get the majority of farmers payments as quickly as possible. We are now processing the last 10% of complex claims and recognise this is taking longer than we anticipated. With the bulk of farmers paid, we are now introducing bridging payments to ease financial cash flow for those farmers still awaiting full payment.

“We hope this step offers some help while we continue working seven days a week to complete our processing of remaining 2015 claims.”

Mr Grimshaw also told the NFU Council that, with four weeks left until the 16th May deadline, RPA continues to receive applications for BPS 2016 with over 14,400 online applications submitted and 2,300 paper applications received by Tuesday.

NFU Vice President Guy Smith said the union is “disappointed” by the large number of outstanding claims, which may now not be completed by the end of April - five months after the payment window opened. However, the NFU welcomed the announcement on bridging payments.

Mr Smith said, “The bridging payments announcement that NFU Council heard today is something the NFU has been urging the RPA to do for many months and we welcome this.

“But this goes hand in hand with overbearing questions –  We still want to know what the problem is with getting payments out and why the RPA failed to meet promises of payment made as recently as March. Our worry is that this is some sort of intrinsic IT problem that the RPA is struggling to fix. If this is the case it may come back to haunt us in the 2016 application year.

“The RPA is in danger of brushing over its mistakes and not learning the lessons or making the much-needed improvements for this year. This is something that David Cameron himself said was essential in PMQs last week. Ploughing on with 2016 and waving 2015 mistakes goodbye is not good enough for the UK farming sector – we deserve an explanation and a better service for next year.”

He added, “It was striking and hugely concerning that well over half of the ninety-strong NFU Council felt that they had outstanding problems to sort out before they could put in an application with any confidence of its accuracy. If this is indicative of the situation across the industry then the RPA has a mountain of outstanding issues to sort out and will need the extra resources to do it.”