Over £40,000 payment to farmer after incorrect advice

What happened

Mr J farmed land that he leased. At the end of the lease, he tried to have his entitlements for the Single Payment Scheme (SPS) put permanently in his name. The SPS is a European Union subsidy intended as income support for farmers. To do that he needed to send RPA an RLE1 form. His assistant called RPA to arrange this but because of a problem with its computer system, his entitlements were not visible.

While RPA say that it told the assistant to complete an RLE1 form extending the entitlements before the lease ran out, there is no evidence that the assistant was reminded to do that after the computer problem arose. Her own notes show that she was told to wait until the computer issues had been fixed before returning an RLE1. RPA's notes of the telephone calls are very brief and do not detail any discussions about how or when to return the RLE1. The assistant's last note showed that she had been advised that she did not need to do anything because the entitlements were correctly recorded, so Mr J applied for his SPS entitlement for 2011. Because an RLE1 form had not been completed he did not get his expected payment of approximately £46,000.

RPA argued that the assistant had been given the correct advice at the outset and it was therefore not prepared to revisit this decision. It refused to accept that it had given the assistant the wrong information and could not see that once the situation changed (for example, the computer problem fixed), it had an obligation to make sure that Mr J understood what he needed to do to get his payment.

What we found

On the balance of probabilities, RPA had misadvised the assistant because it had no evidence to show that it had told her to complete an RLE1 at any time after the computer problems arose.

Putting it right

As a result we asked RPA to apologise to Mr J, pay him £1,000 for its poor complaint handling and pay him his single payment scheme entitlement for 2011 plus interest.