Defra has been accused of “setting farmers up to fail” with its management of the Sustainable Farming Incentive scheme this year.
The department has taken another battering this week as it came under fire in the latest Efra Committee meeting, in which emotions ran high.
A particular focus of the meeting was on the sudden closure of the second window of funding of the SFI scheme, which closed less than six hours after it opened last month.
Sarah Bool, Conservative MP for South Northamptonshire, led the questions on the subject. She asked why, if the government knew there would not be enough funding to go around, the scheme was allocated on a first come, first serve basis.
She accused the government of “setting farmers up to fail” as it was clear that many would not receive any funding.
In response, farming minister Stephen Morgan said several times that he was “really keen to learn lessons” and reiterated his commitment to get rid of the highly criticised first come, first serve scheme.
“I have started conversations with the sector to see how we design this scheme for the future,” he said, having heard “heartbreaking stories of the impact it had”, including one raised by Bool herself of one farmer leaving a funeral to try and get an application in.
Bool added that the running of the scheme was another instance of the “carpet being swept away from under [farmers’] feet”. She questioned how farmers could have known the scale of challenge when the time of the opening of the slot was not published.
“Defra exactly knew it was going to be completely oversubscribed, there wasn’t sufficient funding to allow this, and farmers weren’t given any indication,” said Bool. “They weren’t told exactly when the window would open so many were staying up throughout the night.”
Chair of the Efra Committee, Alistair Carmichael, added to the pile on, questioning whether Defra had learned any lessons from the first window, which also closed quickly in June. Why, when it became clear that the window was filling up quickly, was it not paused, he asked.
“You knew there was a problem coming down the track, and you decided to carry on with it nevertheless,” said Carmichael.
Morgan’s defence was that he had heard from farmers that they wanted “consistency” from Defra. This was met with scorn from both Bool and Carmichael.
Carmichael quipped: “So even if you are wrong it is still important to be consistent?”
Meanwhile, Bool said: “I think when farmers talk about wanting a consistent approach they just want to know they can actually apply to scheme and there will be money.
“You did say earlier on that ‘the decisions I make are based on the evidence before me’. The evidence was screaming to anyone that this was going to be a problem,” she said, adding that “this cannot happen again”.
“I have no faith that this won’t be repeated in the future,” she said.
This was after it had been challenging to get a straight answer out of Morgan on how many farmers the department was expecting to apply for the scheme versus how much the budget was.
He repeatedly the avoided the question, describing the number of farmers are merely ”high demand” or “significant”.
His continued avoidance of the question earned an interruption from Carmichael, who said “unless we get the right answer to that, nothing else is going to make sense”.
“It is really important, this, because there is a lot of expectations on farmers to be able to forward plan and part of forward planning is to know exactly whether they can or can’t get into these schemes,” Bool added.
Mike Rowe, director general for food and farming at Defra, provided the clarification that there was an excess of 20,000 expiring agreements going into this year’s scheme.
During the second window, 12,200 farms received funding and “our best guess is northwards of 10,000” missed out on the scheme.
“We knew the budget was going to be heavily oversubscribed,” Rowe admitted, pointing to changes the government had made to “try and make it go as far as possible”.
Questions were also raised about the scale of the budget as the value of the expiring agreements was £520m, while the SFI budget was only £310m.
“You’re committing to having this longer-term vision, you’re committing to making sure the funding’s there, but there is an open gap here,” Bool said.
Rowe said he did not think there was “missing money”, with other schemes expected to take a larger share of funding.
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