Bungling officials paid more than £175,000 in farm subsidies to a Norfolk farming family - and then two years later asked for the money back.

The pay-outs came to light as MPs on the influential public accounts committee published a report into the single farm payments fiasco today, slating the Rural Payments Agency for a catalogue of blunders including computer failures and causing financial hardship for thousands of farmers.

And they concluded the RPA's errors will cost taxpayers a total of about £348m in fines from the European Commission for failing to implement the payment system.

The cross-party committee's 44-page report reveals that staff made two sets of 19 payments of more than £50,000 to the same claimants and the Defra agency has only issued two invoices demanding repayment of this overpaid £1m.

Among the 19 cases was widow Elizabeth Turner who received two bank payments in five weeks. She realised the agency had probably overpaid about £100,000 and offered to pay the money back.

Mrs Turner, of Ben Burgess Farms of Howe, near Brooke, is still waiting after three years for the correct payment to be calculated.

South Norfolk MP Richard Bacon, a member of the committee, said today: “The RPA's failure to get a grip on the single payment scheme is still proving toxic for England's farmers.”

Mrs Turner, a partner in the family's farming business, is still battling with the Defra agency. “We wrote to Defra in the first instance,” she said. “And then we telephoned them. And they were always, always going to look into it.”

“We knew we'd been overpaid which is why we wrote to them.

She said an electronic bank payment of £74,202.02 was made on May 10, 2006 and on June 20, another payment of £102,144.14 was made.

“That was the over-payment and then we didn't hear anything for two years. Then they write and tell us they've overpaid us. We're in a complete muddle,” said Mrs Turner.

“There's nothing you can do except bang your head against a wall.”

One son, William, who runs the arable and livestock farm of about 700 acres, son Robert and a third son Ben, who runs the leading agricultural engineering business, Ben Burgess & Co, of Norwich, are all shareholders. They run about 400 beef cattle including suckler cows on marshes as well as outdoor pigs.

The RPA, which paid 98pc of 2006 claims by June 2007, told Mrs Turner last Christmas it would not be making a single farm payment for the current year.

Mr Bacon added: “Ministers went ahead on the back of bad advice. What officials said was possible was, in fact, impossible. As a result, chaos ensued.”

Defra, now led by Dame Helen Ghosh, chose to implement the most complex bureaucratic solution in the shortest possible timescale from 2005. As a result, there were massive delays in payments to farmers in England, which caused the industry major hardship. The rest of the UK adopted a simpler payment system.

And even by January 2008, a fifth of payments for the 2005 and 2006 years or about 20,000 claims were incorrect.

The MPs revealed that the average claim cost £750 to process and eight days. The average cost of handling the 106,000 claims in 2006 exceeded the value of payments.

 Source : Eastern Daily Press