The Rural Payments Agency (RPA) has paid 582 farmers from the Truro and Falmouth area £5,291,415 in the first two weeks of the 2014 Single Payment Scheme (SPS) payment window.

The news comes as the RPA reports it broke last year’s performance record on the SPS by making more payments than ever before on the first banking day of the payment window - meeting its end of December targets four weeks ahead of schedule.

Nationally, the RPA had paid 97,661 customers a total of £1.391bn in the first week, which is equivalent to 96 per cent of eligible claims and 92.7 per cent of the estimated fund value for SPS 2014.

RPA Planning and Performance Director John Carter said: “This performance shows just how far we have come in our drive to become a trusted, efficient and effective organisation and I want to thank our people and our industry partners who worked so hard to achieve this outcome.

“It delivers on our Business Plan pledge to continue offering the best service possible to farmers by maintaining our high performance, whilst preparing to deliver on new CAP policies and a new rural payments system next year.

“If farmers want to be paid as early as possible next year, then I would urge them to register on the new rural payments online service as soon as invited to do so. That’s because for this, the first year of Basic Payment Scheme (BPS), there will be lots to do as we gather new information and ask farmers to check that the details we hold are still correct. Once all their details are correct on our new online service it will be a lot quicker to apply in future years.”