2009 Saw UK Farmers Face Massive Increase in Penalties

There has been a huge increase in the fines imposed on British farmers for flouting rules and regulations and breaching various support schemes. Farmers have faced heavy fines for minor mistakes such as filling in application forms wrong and there seems no clear distinction between a genuine error when trying to complete complicated application forms and attempts to fraud the system.

English farmers were given penalties of just over one million pounds in 2008, but in 2009 this more than doubled to over two and half million pounds. Close to one and half thousand Welsh farmers saw penalties of more than two million pounds in 2009, a 175% increase from 2008. In Scotland there was a five-fold increase in the amount of agricultural fines handed out from 2008 to 2009.

The vast majority of fines were imposed on farmers in the livestock sector and were usually for inadequate record keeping and not for animal welfare issues. In fact animal husbandry is stated to have improved slightly over the last year.

Currently any mistake is classed as potential fraud and the farmer punished accordingly. Yet with so much paperwork and ever more complicated application forms, mistakes are common place and usually the result of not understanding exactly what is required when filling in the form, or placing the wrong figure in the wrong box, not deliberate fraud.

In the past a minor error would have led to the farmer receiving a warning letter or a small fine. Now such small and unintentional mistakes leave the farmer facing severe penalties.

The president of the Scottish NFU has said that penalty levels are now ‘significantly out of line’ with the seriousness of the mistake and that the NFU is involved in talks with European bodies to try and find a fairer system. The President of the Farmers Union of Wales has also said they have ‘long-standing concerns’ and that in the last 12 months there has been a large increase in the level of penalties given.

Unfortunately the current system is not clear and many of the rules are subjective. The auditors responsible for handing out the fines are often different people to those that are in charge of administering the regulations.