£1/2m bonuses for Beckett bunglers who drove farmers to brink of ruin

The Rural Payments Agency (RPA) was responsible for a fiasco which cost the taxpayer an estimated £500million and was blamed for several suicides among farmers forced to wait months for money they were depending on.

Yet documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that 1,082 employees were awarded the generous bonuses over a two-year period. In 2004-2005, one senior official got up to £25,000, three received up to £10,000 and 530 were given a "flat rate" of £550.

In the following year, three got up to £25,000, another three received up to £10,000 and 542 junior and middle-ranking employees were given £500.

Of the RPA's 4,500 staff, about 3,000 worked on the farm payments scheme, but a spokesman said it was impossible to say how many had received bonuses.

The agency was set up by the then Environment Secretary Margaret Beckett to pay about 115,000 farmers more than £1.5billion in EU subsidies. Its failure to distribute the money led to calls for Mrs Beckett's resignation.

Last month, an influential all-party committee of MPs said Mrs Beckett should have been demoted rather than promoted to Foreign Secretary.

The agency's chief executive, Johnston McNeill, lost his job but was still drawing his £114,000 salary six months after being told to stand down.

Conservative MP Rob Wilson, who uncovered the figures, said he was "shocked and appalled" at the bonuses. He added: "I am sure the farmers who have yet to receive payments due to them will share my disgust."

The Mail on Sunday revealed three weeks ago that 800 civil servants at the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, which runs the RPA, are to be sacked on Chancellor Gordon Brown's orders as "punishment" for the farm fiasco.

An agency spokesman said: "The Cabinet Office sets out the framework within which departments may make pay and bonus awards to senior civil servants."

This is the second embarrassing disclosure about performance awards for Government employees involved in the fiasco.

Last year Ministers were forced to admit that senior Defra managers assigned to sort out the mess at the RPA had been given more than £7million in bonuses.