Opinion: BPS cash was simply ‘too good to be true’
© GNP What is it we tell our children (and ourselves) over and over again? “If it seems too good to be true, then it is.”
I’ve neglected to follow this advice twice in recent years. The first time, I was trawling the internet (never a good start) for another pair of the best Timberland boots I’ve ever owned.
Multiple websites had sold out long ago, but I finally found them. They seemed astonishingly cheap, but the website seemed OK, and even featured the Timberland name in its URL.
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The fact that my normal credit card kept refusing to pay should have been a clue that not all was right, but I pressed on, and finally parted with my cash via another card.
Some weeks later, no boots. The “helpline” was answered by a baffled mother out shopping, and my cousin in Denver chased up the US address. Fake.
Thankfully, my blushes were saved by a call to the credit card company, who were happy to refund me, and gleefully took as many details as possible for a bit of chasing up.
Something told me that they were underemployed that week.
The second case of “too good to be true” is rather more serious. It’s our decoupled Basic Payment Scheme (BPS) payments.
In theory, three more annual cheques, two of them (in our case) in five-figure territory, and completely unconnected from any act of farming. Was that really going to happen?
The chart we downloaded and waved under the bank manager’s nose was – upon closer inspection – brutally honest.
Reductions, and therefore payments, beyond 2024 were “estimated”.
We missed that bit, and while I’m not saying that we were relying on them for the three years before the pensions start arriving, they were certainly part of our financial daydreams.
Not for round-the-world tours, or that Browning B25 I’ve always hankered after, or the last petrol Mazda before washing-machine-engine-powered cars are compulsory.
No – the tapering payments were pencilled in to keep on top of the rent on our downsized acres so that we weren’t having to farm by clipboard, inspectors and TLAs. We were relishing the idea of being almost form-free for a few years.
Alas, that was not to be. In the tsunami of spite-inspired news that hit farmers a few weeks ago, the sudden chop of the BPS seems to have gone relatively unnoticed.
And it was the first of the financial tidal waves to affect us.
We learned quite quickly to stop being smug about our last harvest being boosted by events in Ukraine, or that we cleared out 90% of our kit on a very upbeat second-hand market.
We’ve dodged the IHT bullet, too, being tenant farmers.
After years of struggling to raise an overdraft or get a chunky loan – because we had nothing to borrow against – it might be considered an overdue positive of being a tenant.
And I hope I won’t lose too many friends by saying that the long-term loans being proposed to pay off IHT sound awfully similar to what we tenants call “rent”.
Complaining is unwise, though. Farming’s image is doing well in the public eye these days – whining about not getting free money would do nothing but harm.
It seemed too good to be true, and so it proved. We really should know by now. Happy Christmas anyway.