The December 2014 SFP will be the last utilising the existing infrastructure and RPA computer system. These payments should be with producers in early December 2014.
Thereafter the new system will take responsiblitity, with its ‘greening’ provisions, the details of which hopefully will become clearer.
My fear is that irrespective of the clarity of the detail, we are once again having to embark on a wholescale reimplementation of a complex computerised payment system. The government does not have a good track record in this regard and despite some reassurance in that the quatum of detail changes is not as great as for SFP I do have some concern as to whether this wholescale change can be managed so as to allow the 2015 payments to be made on time. It might therefore be prudent to ‘budget’ for some slippage of the 2015 payments? I hope I am wrong.