What on earth has been going on, and why did everyone start yelling?
Firstly, a little catch up for those out of the loop. The Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) is a government scheme, where farmers and other landowners, or their tenants, get to pick through a list of ‘actions’ that will help them do the work the government want them to do. It is based on the idea of our taxes (public money) being used for things that benefit us (public goods). These public goods include clean water, healthy soils, abundant wildlife and clean air, but don’t include food or a functioning food system. (I know, I know, but that’s just how it is).
Each action has a list of things you must do, or not do, and a price you would be paid if you sign up and do the things. Some actions can be layered on the same field, for example ‘Manage grassland with very low nutrient inputs’ (CLIG3) (£151 per hectare) can be layered with ‘lenient grazing supplement’ (GRH10) (£25 per hectare) and maybe Organic conversion added in as well.
It’s a kind of pick and mix, with a lot of options for all kinds of land, some of which are stupid (scrub creation SCR1 being my main nemesis), some very sensible. You spend time, and sometimes money, figuring out which action fits which bit of land best, and if the money offered is enough to change your business plans, then you apply to join the scheme.
Applying happens within a ‘Window’, kind of like the transfer window for football. But unlike the football transfer window this window has a habit of sometimes, but not always, slamming shut without warning, adding a rather alarming layer of jeopardy to the whole process.
So, this is not a straight up farming subsidy, it is applying to be paid to do the work that the government wants doing. Its main window (SFI26 window number 2) was opened on the 22nd of September with a budget of £233 million, and was abruptly shut 5 hours and 48 minutes later having run out of cash, which considering window number 1, a more restricted affair, with its budget of £60 million, ran for 8 weeks from the 30th of June to the end of August this year, and had a underspend of £3,000,000, seems fast…
Add to that the application process itself was also not quite the smooth-running IT experience you may have expected… not even for the most computer literate folk out there, the helplines were overwhelmed, the maps (ha!) didn’t work, the general accessibility of the application left a lot to be desired, and a fair number of people hadn’t even started applying when that window crashed shut. In short, it was a mess.
The kind of mess that breaks people, both financially and mentally.
Which I think we can all agree is less than ideal.
Who is really to blame for the debacle (other than me)?
Victim blaming time. It’s the farmers fault, and the landowners, and land agents, and farm secretaries…
Let’s get this victim blaming part out of the way first, you can’t have a good blame game without it, not that the farmers and landowners are the main victims of this mess. The main victims are the soil, the water and the very air we breathe, the slithering, crawling, walking, flying creatures that we should be able to look after. Whole living ecosystems are the real victims when we take a step back. The Sustanible Farming Incentive is, after all, public money paid to people prepared to step up and do the necessary and often hard work fixing the broken wild world. That’s what it is for, and that’s what got failed, and failed at a scale that is hard to comprehend.
But those people prepared to do the graft, who looked towards the scheme with an odd, braced kind of hope, the kind that includes the knowledge of hard physical work heading your way, well, they are victims to. That application day, the mess and stress, the heartaches and headaches it bought will live on in modern farming folklore possibly for decades.
But still, we have to face it, a lot of us went in naively. A lot of us made mistakes.
We were told, maybe not clearly, and maybe not loudly enough, that it would be carnage, that the cash would go fast. ‘Competitive’ and a ‘high demand’ were the words used again and again. We just didn’t take it as seriously as we should. We thought the cash grab would take a couple of days, maybe a week, maybe longer. We thought the system would be reasonably straightforward. We thought we could fill in the form with the normal amount of hassle, and we would have time to clear up any issues either online or on the phone during the widow.
We were wrong.
Maybe if we had been less naïve, we would all have been at home, logged on, from dawn to dusk, waiting. No trips to the market, to the Dr’s, to the fields. Treat it like an office worker would, sat down waiting, double checking everything while you wait. But far too many of us didn’t fully understand what we were up against. The year and a half of waiting, the building demand, the tiny budget, so we were caught out and before some had even logged on the cash was gone.
How naïve. But in our defence the last window of application didn’t close for 8 weeks and was left with an underspend of £3m, and the one before that ran for 8 months, so why would you think the budget would all be allocated in less than 6 hours this time?
Many of us, myself included, though the application would be straightforward, a form like so many that had been filled in before. I assumed that the buttons would work and that the fields that were mapped as pasture in a different part of the same system would be acceptable as pasture in this part. I assumed I would be able to undo, cancel, delete. I assumed I wouldn’t need to study all the videos on how to apply.
I assumed wrong.
Foolish me. I really should have known better. After all, how many times have I sat baffled or despairing over an RPA form? For years I have sweated my way through similar forms. That one is firmly on me. I should have been braced for the horror.
I also assumed that my dyslexia was mild enough (a delusion I fall victim to often) that I wouldn’t need to search out the disability and accessibility help. That was a big mistake. But really, should I have to search out the help? Shouldn’t that help be obvious and built in, especially as the RPA know that the farming community has twice the normal rate of dyslexia and neuro-spiciness within its ranks than the rest of the population? These systems should be defaulting to accessible for everyone. Instead, it’s like a hellscape of stupid jumping boxes filled with meaningless codes and numbers. A hellscape that takes enormous effort to work through. Disability (and yes dyslexia is a disability) shouldn’t cost this much.
So yes, we were warned, and yes, we were naïve. But also, if those with office staff and months (years?) of preparing, people like the Allerton Project, didn’t get in, would it actually have made a difference? If we had all be online at 10am, and if that didn’t crash the system, then the money would have been gone even faster, and if we all had been able to prefill applications ready to send, the financial cut off would have been minutes not hours.
So, it’s sort of our fault, but also very not our fault…
Onto the next lot of people in this blame game.
The RPA. DEFRA. The folk in charge.
Now here again I am close to victim blaming. I’ve worked on a helpdesk, its horrible. The staff at the RPA would also have had a terrible day. I bet they went home shaky. I bet some fell apart. Higher up the chain of command I’m sure it was also awful. Seeing the money haemorrhage out, seeing the helplines struggle, hearing the IT issues roll in, knowing it is falling apart for so many people. Knowing nature could have been helped on a massive scale and that there just isn’t the money to do it all.
Horrible stuff.
Maybe they should have expected the speed, the chaos, but the last window had a first day surge then died off. Why would they expect a 6-hour scramble?
Well, I’d argue that it was fairly obvious that it would be mayhem.
The drought, the floods last winter, the price of fuel, of fertiliser, the closing of the 24/25 SFI window without notice, the obviously tiny budget, the slashing of BPS, the ending of SFI23 agreements and all those Mid-Tier ones (mine included), as well as those who’s agreements ended over the last year, the inclusion of nature reserves and other ‘less traditional’ receivers of agriculture government funding into the scheme, the years of work to get people engaged with nature friendly or regen farming… those things do rather add up. If the RPA and DEFRA didn’t see the underfunded car-crash coming, well maybe they should have.
But even without all that, the IT stuff really shouldn’t have been so glitchy. The communication with farmers should have been clearer, the application process should have been a lot easier. I understand the secrecy surrounding the start time, after all if we all logged in at once then it would have crashed the system. Ticketmaster may manage thousands of users logging on at once, but no government website could ever handle it. But the rest? Well, that shouldn’t have been so bad.
Caught on the backfoot by a maelstrom of events outside their control, and with a laughably small budget for the job in hand I have huge sympathy for those at the other coal face of this. It’s a very difficult problem to solve, this spreading cash out across England to help the other wilder inhabitants of the land.
‘First come first serve and may the New Gods of IT favour you’ is at least a clear process. It’s not a good process, it is deeply unfair, But at least it is a process.
No matter what other process could be put in place, there’s bound to be drawbacks. Say we all had to tender for the cash? (imagine!) Or had it thrown at areas deemed worthy (I think that’s called spatially targeted funding, and I think it’s the way, according to the farming roadmap, this stuff is heading anyway). No matter what, someone somewhere, and some wild things who live near that ‘somewhere’ will lose out. Well, unless the budget gets bigger… So yes, I have a certain amount of sympathy for those in charge, it’s a hell of a job.
Mind you, my sympathy did run pretty dry as I faced the tick box hell covered in error messages, while the ‘session expiring soon’ messages popped up, and the emails telling me that the money was running out pinged into my inbox… my ability to see both sides of a problem only extends so far… And some of that mess we faced was completely avoidable with just a little bit of understanding who would be at the keyboard filling in the forms. A bit of seeing who was actually asking for the money to do the work and figuring out how best to support who they are (rather than who you feel they should be) may have helped.
So, who else is in the firing line?
I’d blame the Farming Minister, or the Secretary of State for Environment, Food, and Rural affairs, but neither Stephen Morgan or Angela Eagle have been in the post long enough to have found out where the coffee machine is, let alone what the problems are. Mind you, with 10 different DEFRA secretaries of state in 10 years, who actually has had time to sort anything out? Any workplace that has had that many management changes in such a short length of time is bound to be both chaotic and a bit overly self-willed. Defra must be running itself with very little input from ministers considering the turnover and the length of time each new incumbent would need to get up to speed. So, should I blame the Ministers for this mess? It seems a bit harsh, even if they are actually the ones in charge.
Still, they are the ones supposedly in charge. And they get paid better than me. So, some blame can attach to them just to spread it all out fairly!
Right, does the blame now move up or back down?
Well, Up is another new boy…
…and one faced with huge problems every which way he looks, all of which require funding. This nature recovery fund that farmers are shouting about could easily seem to be pretty small fry compared to say social care, or the army. Yes, its farming, and food, and ecosystems, yes, it’s seen by those involved as Everything. And yes, it’s a Huge deal for our industry… but it is not the same as, say, 30 miles of new dual carriageway, or a tiny section of the never dying zombie that is HS2. It certainly has a smaller budget. It is only functioning hydrology, soil, sustainable food and wild things. It’s only farmers desperately trying to fund the work they are willing and able to do.
So yes, the blame can head upwards. The treasury spending limits are set up there; the overarching direction of travel comes from above. The thing is, those at the top are exceptionally good at shifting the blame back down, and those new to the job have a cast iron get out. It literally wasn’t him that did it.
Back down it goes then… but not far. The treasury has a part to play. This was always going to be some sort of mess because nature and land management are not funded well. Without enough cash to match the ambition none of this sustainable stuff works. We basically need more cash, and lots of it. But that decision is made by the cabinet. And who runs that… back up we go…
I shall leave the blame bouncing about between those at the top, with a fair chunk sticking to the ministers, DEFRA, the RPA, their IT department, their mapping department, and a bit sticking to us at the bottom of this heap, for being so naïve as to think the powers that be would have designed a workable, well-funded, easy to access scheme, so we could help nature without risking our businesses, our land, our livelihoods, or our homes.
We have to face that the world of government support for farming didn’t quite change in the way we were told it would, that the ‘public money for public goods’ funding is tiny, and we now have a new (and apparently improved) system that leaves a huge number of people depressed, disengaged or in debt.
And faced with that the mistakes I made on the 22nd of September pale into insignificance.
The images in this article contain public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0
