Guidance

Cross compliance 2016

Cross compliance guidance for farmers and landowners if they claim for the Basic Payment Scheme (BPS), a stewardship scheme or the English Woodland Grant Scheme (EWGS) - for the 2016 year only.

Published 30 December 2015

• From: Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs, Rural Payments Agency, Environment Agency, Natural England, and Animal and Plant Health Agency

• Applies to: England

This guidance is for the 2016 year only.

Find the latest rules on the cross compliance pages.

Guidance

Guide to cross compliance in England 2016

Inspections and calculating penalties

For information about inspections or penalties read the relevant section in ‘The guide to cross compliance in England 2016’ above.

If you’re inspected and the inspector finds something wrong, they use a set of standards called ‘verifiable standards’ to assess how serious the non-compliance is. This is based on the extent of the non-compliance and how severe and permanent it is.

RPA uses a guide to work out the penalty that is to be applied.

They also use a calculator to work out how severe a non-compliance is for cattle identification and registration for SMR 7.

Get a copy of these documents from ruralpayments@defra.gsi.gov.uk. Tell them which documents you want and use ‘Verifiable Standards 2016’ as the email heading.

These are the results from cross compliance inspections in 2016 (PDF, 301KB, 25 pages) - they show the most common reasons why farmers failed to meet each Statutory Management Requirement (SMR) and Good Agricultural and Environmental Conditions (GAEC).

Published 30 December 2015