Rural Payments and Services

The system was unavailable for a short period of time yesterday and performance has not been as good as it should have been in the last couple of days. We’re sorry for inconvenience this may have caused you. We’ve made some improvements recently – there’s more information about this below.

You can make amendments to SAFs up to 15 June, 2015. If you wish to make any changes after this date, you must withdraw the SAF and resubmit it before 10 July – and we will apply late submission penalties. If you have LMO continuing commitments, we will not be able to accept the late LMO application.

We encourage everyone to submit their application online, but from now on, where necessary, pre-populated paper forms can also be made available. If you are experiencing problems, please contact your area office who will be able to help.

On Monday we had a maintenance window to make some system improvements.

The following were successfully made to Rural Payments and Services:

1. SAF improvements

Items were missing from the communication log – emails were being issued to customers asking to check their communication log for their SAF acknowledgement letter, however the letter didn’t appear in the communications log.

The compatibility issue for Rural Priorities Organic option – when the Rural Priorities Organic option was selected, the land area was doubling and an error message appeared stating that the options were not compatible.

Ecological Focus Area – some customers were incorrectly getting Ecological Focus Area validation errors when completing their SAF.

2. General improvements

Rounding land parcels – the rounding element in land parcel calculations was not being applied consistently across the system.

3. Agri-Environment Climate Scheme (AECS) improvements

Wrong letter sent for AECS application – Agri-Environment Climate Scheme acknowledgement letters were being incorrectly issued with the Forestry Grant Scheme template.

AECS change – the payment rate for some water quality and flood risk options were not calculating correctly.

AECS receipts – when AECS applications were submitted, they were not generating receipts for some people.

4. Forestry Grant Scheme improvements

Forestry Grant Scheme applications losing capital items after submission – the 'Woodland Improvement Grant – Restructuring Regeneration' option wasn’t saving correctly.

The deadline for AECS submissions is 12 June 2015. Please remember to complete the forms detailed below and upload these with any AECS submission.

For the vast majority of applications a farm environmental assessment must be included. The forms and documents are:

- Farm environment tables
- Farm environment map (including diffuse pollution risks field assessment)
- Farm environment management map
- If relevant the diffuse pollution steading assessment

The guidance and templates can be found here.

For some applications the endorsement form, for options or capital items outwith the spatial targeting zone, may also be required. The guidance and form can be found here.

You should upload the supporting documents individually, rather than as one amalgamated document.

For this application round, the accompanying forms can be accepted, on paper, after the application submission deadline, until 30 June. If a form has not been uploaded as part of the application, please forward it to the RPID / SNH contact listed in your submitted application receipt.

If relevant, the guidance and form for vulnerable priority species required to support points for scoring under national priorities can be found at here.

We have made a few changes to some of the guidance recently. Please check out the updates for more information.