THERE has been another cock-up by the Scottish Government's agricultural administration – but this time it has given some farmers too much money.

Back in September, Rural Economy CabSec Fergus Ewing announced the offer of interest-free loans equivalent to 80% of farmers' Basic Payment as a stopgap measure to avoid a repeat of last winter's CAP payment delays through its main computer system.

Of the stop-gap scheme's potential £300million budget, around £256.5million has since been taken up by 12,500 applicants, with a further 5300 loan offers pending. However, 166 farm businesses that applied for and received these loans have now been told that they were given too much, and asked to hand the extra back.

NFU Scotland said this week that yet another government own goal over farm payments will leave farmers angry and frustrated, and further undermine confidence that ScotGov's new CAP system will ever settle down to 'normal' service.

ScotGov, however, maintained that the 'small number' of errors, arising from 12,500 rapidly turned-around applications to a temporary scheme, had been caught and corrected, and had not arisen from the main Rural Payments IT system.

The problem was revealed when Borders-based land and property agents Seed and Co received a number of calls from clients which have been contacted by the ScotGov payments team to say there has been an internal error and they have been overpaid.

Mr Ewing has since admitted, in a letter to Holyrood's rural economy committee, that staff assigned to the loan scheme had accidentally reversed the Euro/Sterling exchange rate to some applicants, which had produced a total overpayment of £746,000. He added that, as of December 5, 159 of the affected claimants had been informed of the error by telephone, and issued with an invoice to repay their share of that excess, and efforts were underway to contact the remainder.

Those invoices had a repayment term of 30 days, said Mr Ewing, and as the situation was no fault of the claimants, there was no interest on the overpayment – although he did not say what would happen if the invoices were not paid within that 30 day limit.

NFU Scotland’s director of policy Jonnie Hall said: “We have been made aware of a small number of cases where an error in basic arithmetic has seen some loan scheme recipients overpaid in sterling and monies having to be returned to Scottish Government.

“For a simple calculation around multiplication and division to result in such an own goal will leave those affected angry and frustrated, undermining some of the goodwill built up by the timely delivery of the loan scheme.

"Confidence that support delivery systems will ever being fit for purpose have also been dealt another blow," added Mr Hall. “We all make mistakes, but it is worth reminding Scottish Government that when farmers and crofters make that sort of simple unintentional mistake, it is taken as final and penalties normally follow. When the Scottish Government make such errors, they simply ask for the money back.

"A more proportionate approach to unintentional errors for all involved in support schemes is long overdue," he suggested.