The financial director of one of the five producer organisations facing the axe from the EU Fruit and Vegetable Aid Scheme has claimed the Rural Payments Agency “could have acted illegally”.
John Smith of Northern Mushrooms said the company now has less than two weeks to meet the RPA’s requirements before being derecognised, and has expressed fears for the future health of the Yorkshire-based business. “We were previously suspended and then told we had to meet three sets of requirements, all of which we successfully proved to RPA-approved third party auditors,” explained Smith.
“The RPA has since come to us with a fresh set of requirements, but in my mind we already addressed their original concerns and the proper action should have been for our suspension to be lifted and then imposed again rather than us being decommissioned; we don’t believe they have acted correctly and our lawyers will robustly fight our case.”
Smith claims the RPA still owes Northern Mushrooms around £500,000 in repayments from 2011 and believes the RPA’s latest concerns over the state of the company are unfounded. “The minimum turnover for a mushroom organisation in the PO scheme is £250,000; ours is around £2 million. We can more than sustain ourselves.”
With only 31 POs currently approved, NFU chief horticultural adviser Hayley Campbell-Gibbons said the PO expert group - comprised of the NFU, RPA, DEFRA and several PO sector representatives - has held two meetings since June and is focused on securing and introducing a more successful scheme for UK horticulture. “The current recognition review process has been nothing less than tortuous for many of the POs,” she added.
The RPA told FPJ the process is “still ongoing” and a definite decision on the future of the five is expected within the next two weeks.
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