Government reveals £77m yearly admin cost of farm payments

Hat tip to Wyn Grant for this from his Common Agricultural Policy blog.

Just when we thought the Single Farm Payment couldn't get any more ridiculous, we now discover that the cost of administering the payments in tens of thousands of cases is far higher than the value of the subsidy itself.

A Parliamentary question from Lib Dem MP Tim Farron has revealed that the average administration cost for processing an individual claim in the UK under the EU's Single Farm Payment Scheme is a whopping £742.

A separate Ministerial statement from UK Environment Secretary, Hilary Benn, puts the number of individual claims for 2007/08 at around 104,000. This means the total cost of administering these claims is a staggering £77 million.

What's more, 14,645 of these claims were under £400 in value, and 636 of those were under £50 in value.

The total possible payout for these 636 claims is £30,315 but, according to the average cost of processing an individual claim, these could have cost £471,912 to administer!

Madness.