A major shake-up of the way the Rural Payments Agency is run has been announced. Its boss Mark Grimshaw tells Karen Dent that ensuring farmers receive their money on time will be the top priority.
THE much-maligned Rural Payments Agency, which issues Single Farm Payment cheques, has revealed its five-year plan for change which includes tackling problems that have dogged it in the past and preparation for reform of the Common Agricultural Policy in 2013.
Defra is pumping an extra £21.8m into the agency over the next financial year and has provisionally earmarked £19.1m more for the following two financial years.
The Rural Payments Agency (RPA) unveiled the plan shortly after announcing its best payment statistics to date and also set a new deadline of the end of March for publishing its payment plan for 2012. Last year the schedule was published in November, the month before the actual subsidy payments began.
The changes are being driven through by chief executive Mark Grimshaw, who joined the RPA from the Child Support Agency last January.
He said the image problem the RPA has been saddled with isn’t “a major problem for me” but was something he had to take into consideration.
“We know the brand has had some difficulties historically,” he said. “The challenge is to improve performance so that in the course of time, if they get the service they expect, it will be the old RPA that failed and the new RPA that succeeded.”
Mr Grimshaw said new figures, up to the end of business on Monday, showed 93.7% of payments by volume had been made and 90.7% by value.
That’s compared with 88.4% by volume and 85.1% by value by the same time a year earlier.
“There has been a focus on the processes and the procedures and the way we plan,” he says. “One of the changes I’ve made is to set up an executive team that includes planning and performance.
“The fact that we can give performance figures up to yesterday, if you want, that’s a key part of helping us to change the business.
“One of the early challenges I identified over a year ago was the fact we didn’t have an experienced, focused executive team. My challenge was to recruit a team of experienced people, knowledgeable in the key areas.”
He now has an eight-strong executive team in place.
