The long-awaited rural payments report, due to be published today, is expected to be critical of the Government’s failure to pay English Farmers their subsides on time over the past two years.

It is expected that the unpaid subsidies could have reached as much as £500 million and Food and Rural Affairs select committee will now have to determine whether responsibility should fall on further ministers and officials as well as those who have already lost their jobs already.

The expected £500m total is said to include up to £305m in fines from Europe, £156m on “fixing” the failures at the Rural Payments Agency and £21m in interest payments to farmers last year.

The fact that 116,000 British farmers missed out on £1.5 billion worth of single farm payments by the EU’s legal deadline at the end of June has been blamed on the choice of a more complicated payments system. However heads have rolled and more could follow; Lord Bach, the junior minister responsible, and Johnson McNeill, chief executive of the Rural Payments Agency, were both let go.

Last month David Miliband, the Environmental Secretary admitted that nearly 25,000 farmers have still not been paid properly, although a Defra spokesman said that 70 per cent of the £1.54bn due to be paid this year had been paid.

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