RPA Mapping project - Land maps

[davidw]

I'm not sure how many people know about the latest wonderful scheme from the Rural Payments Agency.
They are issuing revised holding maps for all farms in England (I don't know about the situation for Wales and Scotland).
Apparently its partly due to pressure from Brussels and partly because the old maps were considered to be out of date, but they are sending out 8,000 packs of maps each week.
Eastern England should have theirs by the end of July, Southern and Central England by mid August and then the South West and North will follow on. They expect everyone - in all their spare time - to check the maps for accuracy and either approve or correct them and return them within 28 days.
My point in writing this is to inform everyone that in a trial earlier this year, RPA issued 1000 maps and found that 636 of them were wrong. That's a 63.6% error rate.
Many of these maps have been compiled from aerial photos, apparently it shows electric fence tape very clearly and so they interpret it as a permanent fence. As a result, they have sub-divided many fields that have been split into pony paddocks and issued multiple new field numbers. It also shows the boundary of woodland as the outline of the tree canopy, not the fenceline so some field areas have been considerably reduced. Another issue is that they only accept a physical boundary, like a fence, hedge or wall and not a plough line or crop division. Heaven knows how they handle common grazing land!!
They expect everyone to check their land and deduct areas of buildings, hard standing and ponds from the total holding area. Its likely to be a real challenge for many landowners.

[Broomcroft]

I think we've already has ours done and revised maps were sent to us. We could not believe some of the amendments as they were really tiny. We rejected the amendments (which you are allowed to do) but our rejection was rejected. We have thought of rejecting the rejection of our rejection but thought better of it :D, as life is too short. I think if Americans or Australians could see how tightly controlled all this is in our land, they would be amazed. Some of our suggested changes were .03 of a hectacre.



Edited By Broomcroft on 1247927676