Rural Payments Agency (RPA) is an executive Agency of Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), and operates as the single accredited Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) paying Agency in England on behalf of Defra and the Devolved Administrations. It delivers GBP 2.3 billion of CAP payments each year to the businesses and organisations which supply our food, maintain our rural economy, cultural heritage and environmental landscapes. In total, it is responsible for over 40 EU CAP schemes, some of which apply across GB and the UK.

In functional terms the main components of RPA's key activities are:

Administration, payments and accounting for CAP schemes; Support activities for CAP schemes; Customer support and registration; Management of the Rural Land Register (RLR); British Cattle Movement Service (BCMS); Inspections; and associated Back Office support functions.

The largest scheme is the Single Payment Scheme (SPS) (operated for England only), with around 106,000 farmers receiving total annual payments in the region of GBP 1.86 billion.

RPA is responsible for and makes payments under the Rural Development Plan for England (RDPE) including Environmental Stewardship schemes. These payments are made on behalf of Natural England and Core Defra (and formerly the Regional Development Agencies (RDAs)). In total last year alone, over 300,000 payments were made to its customers including over 125,000 payments (over 98 % within agreed targets) on behalf of Natural England (NE) and the RDAs.

RPA operates an Inspectorate function, which conducts over 23,000 inspections each year at a variety of locations including farms. RPA also manages the Rural Land Register, Defra's database of land used for all land-based CAP schemes, which contains details of around 2.4 million land parcels.

Rural Land Register - The RLR is the corporate spatial repository of land records for the Defra and its executive agencies, Natural England and the Forestry Commission.

In order to meet European Union requirements to have a Geographic Information System (GIS) and to modernise and streamline RPA's approach to administering land-based schemes, RPA embarked on the RLR project in early 2002. Since then geospatial details relating to over 2.4 million land parcels have been mapped against Ordnance Survey MasterMap data, and stored in the RLR. In 2009 RPA undertook a significant programme of work to improve the positional accuracy of the land parcels held and incorporate additional real world changes, adopting iSMART GIS as the core of the RLR system.

The combined figure of customers for the Single Payment Scheme and Environmental Stewardship Schemes is approximately 121,000. As a consequence of this, there are a significant number of requests to register and amend land parcel information.

The current digitisation work is undertaken on-site at RPA's head office in Reading and maintains the land parcel data directly in the RLR iSMART database.

Remote Sensing – The European Union lays down detailed rules for the implementation of CAP, including the requirement that there be a regime of on-the-spot controls to check the eligibility criteria for the schemes concerned. Such controls are undertaken using Remote Sensing (RS) which RPA has done continuously since 1992. The number of RS controls undertaken can vary from year to year, according to the particular inspection strategy adopted for the year in question. Last year approximately 4000 to 4500 single payment scheme applications were examined. The current Remote Sensing work is undertaken off-site.

RPA is now seeking to explore opportunities for both Rural Land Register digitisation and Remote Sensing services to be delivered off-site. Services may commence as soon as practicable on a phased roll-out basis following contract award which maybe from August 2013 to facilitate special projects and exercises, and at full anticipated volumes from 1.12.2013. There maybe a requirement for Defra and other members of the Defra network to also use these services including but not limited to Natural England and Forestry Commission.