Examination of witness (Questions 280
- 299)
WEDNESDAY 21 JUNE 2000
MS JANE
BROWN
280. Yes.
(Ms Brown) We can cost staff time. If we are going
to make 100 staff days or 100 months or whatever available to
do this we know what that will cost us.
281. That would have a contra efficiency effect?
(Ms Brown) Yes, exactly, so we have to make judgments.
Mr Drew
282. It is said that farmers know how to fill
in forms. They do not do it very well, do they?
(Ms Brown) Some do it better than others but it is
true there are problems.
283. Referring back to the Public Accounts Committee
report, they were talking about up to 50 per cent error rate.
That is totally unacceptable, is it not?
(Ms Brown) Yes.
284. It is madness. This is EU at its very worst.
Austin may come in on the back of this.
(Ms Brown) This is where the electronic forms will
be a real help to the farmers, once we can get them ready and
happy, comfortable, using the technology, because an awful lot
of the errors that are made on those forms are things that simply
would not happen if you were completing an intelligent electronic
form: answers missed or internally inconsistent responses given
which the e-form will prevent you from doing.
285. One of the few things we do know is that
farmers like to hand in the form in person. We also know that
where they do hand it in, in person, they seem to have a lower
level of faults than where they do not. I cannot remember the
office where they had the highest number of personal calls but
we know the office with the lowest number of personal calls, Bristol,
seemed to have the highest number of irregularities, as the Public
Accounts Committee says. I derive two things from that. One, there
is a need for advice. How do you term "advice"? We know
there are problems. Secondly, some form of personal contact is
important to get these forms right. Does that have to be at a
Regional Centre?
(Ms Brown) It does not have to be at a Regional Centre.
Even at the moment, we run clinics in the run up to deadline dates
for IACS.
286. Where do you run those?
(Ms Brown) At livestock markets or NFU offices, wherever
it seems to make sense in terms of the local situation.
287. How long have these initiatives been taking
place for? Is this very recent?
(Ms Brown) No, this is not recent. It was one of the
points which the PAC picked up, that we might encourage more of
that in those RSCs that had problems. Bristol has done more of
it in the last year or two. It is difficult to say whether the
cost of doing that is offset by an improvement in the quality
of the forms that come in.
288. To what extent are the errors—I know
they are many and varied—being picked up the same errors?
Is it because the schemes keep changing that errors always accompany
the changes?
(Ms Brown) It is a bit of both. There are very basic
errors that seem to crop up year on year. We do an analysis. The
NSMC does an analysis at the end of each scheme year of what the
problems have been in the forms and what implications that has
for next year's scheme literature; is there something we can do
to clarify the guidance, simplify the form, that kind of thing.
I have a summary of the analysis that was done on the IACS 1999
claim forms. They have listed about 18 common errors which were
experienced. Only four of these would not be helped by an intelligent
electronic form.
289. The comparison made in the Public Accounts
Committee report is with people undertaking self-assessment in
their Inland Revenue activities. Why is there not an onus either
on the farmer to get it right—you have to penalise the farmers
if they do not get it right, as with self-assessment—or
on the system having a proper approach, to make sure that the
system allows the farmer to get it right? Both elements seem to
be wrong at the moment.
(Ms Brown) We do try to use both elements to help
to get it right. We certainly put quite a lot of effort into making
the paper forms and the guidance as clear as we possibly can.
The electronic forms take us a massive step further towards being
able to deliver real assistance to the farmers on that. We are
also in discussion with the Commission in Brussels on the rules
about administering the schemes. We are looking for ways of simplifying
some of the rules and getting a bit more flexibility into the
system so that we do not always have to penalise farmers quite
so hard if they have made a genuine mistake. That clearly is something
that has to be negotiated and agreed with Brussels. We are working
with other like minded Member States to try and get some of the
rules changed.
290. Obviously the allegation made by the PAC
is that it would seem most farmers make genuine mistakes, but
there is a minority who are trying to fiddle the system and yet
there are very few prosecutions that ever arise. Why is that?
(Ms Brown) Again, we have been looking at our approach
to enforcement generally because prosecution is only one part
of it and the penalty rules are such that the administrative penalty
of getting it wrong is often considerably heavier than the fine
a court might impose if you had a successful prosecution.
291. You are actually saying it almost pays
people to be careless?
(Ms Brown) No. I am certainly not saying that. If
they are careless, they are likely to get penalised, but if we
prosecute them they do not necessarily get penalised any more
heavily—in fact, they may get penalised less heavily than
simply the administrative penalties which flow from the schemes.
292. This is true across the whole of the Community,
is it? Obviously, the farmers' allegation is that we have to check
these things; other countries are much more liberal in their interpretation
and just give them the money.
(Ms Brown) We get a lot of comment to that effect.
The Red Tape Working Group which the Minister set up at the end
of last year looked at some of that and found there was not a
great deal of hard evidence to support that.
293. I accept that we are moving to this brave,
new world of IT, although maybe not as quickly as some of my colleagues
would want, but in the short run surely we can get these damned
forms right, because we have had years now and yet the same mistakes
are being made and modifications and new mistakes are appearing.
It is about time that there was a form—I do not think we
have seen it yet but we are led to believe that other countries
produce a much more simplified form which, in the main, farmers
get right or are allowed to get right. What are your comments
on that?
(Ms Brown) We do put a lot of effort into trying to
get our forms as user friendly as we can. We always consult on
the forms and the scheme literature each year or whenever the
literature is modified. We find that it is more helpful to the
farmers to put everything into the one document. I think there
is some evidence—Ireland, for example—that they have
a rather simpler form but they have a second level of guidance
and instruction which the farmer needs to access if his claim
is a bit more complicated.
Chairman
294. Funny you should say that. I have the Irish
IACS form and that is it. It is prefilled in as well.
(Ms Brown) We prefill quite a lot of information as
well.
295. You began by saying that your policing
role is uppermost. You then produce probably the thickest set
of forms in Europe. It seems we approach all this with a different
mentality to everybody else.
(Ms Brown) I do not know whether that is true or not
because I have not studied all the forms in all the other Member
States. We do approach it in a genuine attempt to be as helpful
as we can to the farmers, to explain the rules clearly, to make
full information available to them. We constantly revisit this.
It is not that we did it this way in 1992-93 and—
Chairman: As the Minister is following you,
we may return to that particular item of the forms which are used
with her. That serves notice on her for that.
Mr Mitchell
296. What proportion of staff is involved in
purely regional strategy work?
(Ms Brown) Roughly 85 per cent of the staff effort
goes into administering the CAP schemes. Roughly 15 per cent goes
into the other things which the RSCs do, of which most would be
regional strategy.
297. Of that 15 per cent, is that mainly done
by the higher grades?
(Ms Brown) Yes.
298. Does the present structure mean that MAFF
is overlooked in terms of its wider role on policy because it
is outside the structure? Would it not be better if it was all
now absorbed into the new Regional Centres?
(Ms Brown) The Government Offices? We are working
on proposals for aligning MAFF's regional strategy type activities
with the government offices for the regions.
299. That will mean higher grades moving to
Government Offices.
(Ms Brown) We are working up the detail of exactly
how it will happen but I think it certainly would imply a fairly
senior MAFF presence in the Government Office, yes.
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