The Rural Payments Agency has said that cleansing its data is the most important part of its new five-year strategy and will help to improve the performance of its troubled IT systems.

In its plan for 2012-2017, the executive agency of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs says that the poor quality of data it holds has been one of the main causes of errors and backlogs in its much criticised £350m single payments scheme, which pays subsidies to landowners.