RPA Advice & Guidance and Site Visits
Advice & Guidance is part of a new RPA approach called ‘Delivering Successful Outcomes’ which seeks to help and support agreement holders and farmers to succeed by:
- Monitoring schemes to see where agreement holders and farmers need to help.
- Intervening and taking tangible action if any issues are identified, supporting everyone.
- Measuring if the support given above has increased the amount of understanding and success.
- Ensuring that the environmental aims of the schemes are still being achieved.
In 2024, the RPA set up an intelligence function. This team has three main functions:
- Collect intelligence from multiple sources. This could be agreement holder and farmer feedback, observations of RPA Field Officers, information from RPA’s partners and stakeholders and beyond.
- Analyse the information to understand any common issues and;
- Communicate this to the relevant team for further investigation. That team will then take action, such as updating guidance or processes, sending out support communications or targeted outreach work to find out more.
Using insights and intelligence, the RPA has already put in place some interventions:
- Wet weather adjustment- to support people while they tried to establish and maintain certain actions under SFI and CS.
- ‘All agreement holder’ communications regarding certain CS Capital and Revenue items
- Advice and guidance video to clarify and support information on SFI hedgerow actions
SFI Advice & Guidance Visits
The RPA SFI Advice & Guidance visits fit into the above model as both a monitoring and intervention tool.
Each year the RPA will offer SFI Advice and Guidance visits to a sample of agreement holders.
The RPA will take lessons learned and solutions from these sample visits and offer large-scale targeted communications to the wider agreement holder population.
The principles behind the Advice and Guidance visits are as follows:
Early visits –
The RPA will offer visits to a sample of agreement holders as soon as possible after an agreement goes live
Help the agreement holder -
Kitchen table discussion to ensure that the agreement holder knows what is being asked of them so they can meet their agreement terms. This is also a chance to ask questions and provide feedback
Use any insight -
The RPA will send through visit insights to their intelligence team and share learnings to improve their services
Benefits:
- Reassurance – Giving agreement holders the confidence that they are acting correctly
- Reinforcing best practice – Discussing the importance of elements such as record keeping and keeping evidence
- Collaboration – agreement holders can have their say when RPA feeds back information gathered to the intelligence team
- Reflection – agreement holders have time to reflect on actions chosen and if changes are needed.
Types of Advice & Guidance visits:
The RPA currently offers three types of Advice & Guidance visits to support:
- Sustainable Farming Incentive
- New cattle keeper
- Countryside Stewardship (CS) - capital items
In 2025, the RPA hope to expand these visits for advice and guidance to include:
- Sheep and Goat keeping (SAGRIMO regulation)
SFI Site Visits
Site Visits are different to the Advice & Guidance Visits mentioned above.
On these visits a Field Officer will check that eligibility and requirements have been met for declared actions in an SFI agreement, including the completion and /or review of required management plans and assessments.
How much notice will you get for a site visit?
- Scheme visits, for example, SFI Site Visit up to 14 days
- Regulatory visits, for example Cattle Identification Visits up to 48 hours
What will the Field Officers look at?
At parcel level:
- Land eligibility
- If the requirements have been met
- The physical area/length of the action
What information may the Field Officers need to see?
- Management plans and assessments
- BASIS/FACTS registration numbers (for some actions)
- Locations of your actions on the holding (any location maps)
- Supporting documentation (e.g., photos, seed invoices, cropping plans)
Post-visit communication?
- The Field Officer will send a summary of findings to the agreement holder.
- Once any mapping changes or follow up work (if applicable) is completed, a report form will be sent to the SFI operations team
- The report will undergo validation checks and then be sent on to the agreement holder.
What are reverification visits? The RPA is required by the National Audit Office (NAO) to show that it has robust processes in place for site visits. To check this, the NAO undertake reverification visits, covering a variety of site visits each year. The reverification visit repeats the site visit to check that the Field Officer followed all agreed procedures and that those procedures are fit for purpose.
If you have further questions, customers can contact the RPA through the below options:
- Use the Sustainable Farming Incentive query form to submit, which you can download here.
- Email the team at ruralpayments@defra.gov.uk
- Call 03000 200 301 and following the helpline prompts to speak to a member of the relevant team
- Submit a Farmer Land Manager Query form (used by field officers during their visit to capture queries)
