Letter from the Rt Hon Michael Jack MP,
Chairman, Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee
to Lord Bach, Minister for Sustainable Farming and Food (RPA 12)
1. Thank you for appearing before the Committee
last week and for your responses to our numerous questions. We
are grateful to you and to Johnston McNeill for your contribution
to our inquiry. You may like to know that the Committee has agreed
to publish a brief interim report, based on your evidence, next
week, followed by a more detailed report in due course.
2. Committee staff are in touch with your
officials and the RPA about various points on which witnesses
promised follow-up information. We look forward to receiving this
additional written evidence. But there are some separate issues
about which, given their importance, I wanted to write to you
myself.
3. At various points in the hearing, I and
my colleagues pressed you on the information Ministers had received
from the RPA about the implementation method to be chosen for
the Single Farm Payment, and about progress towards achieving
the February 2006 target date for starting payment of the SFP.
We have had written evidence from the Tenant Farmers' Association
suggesting that the RPA supported the historic basis for paying
the SFP, and warned Defra about the workload that delivering the
dynamic hybrid approach would incur. (A copy of their written
submission is enclosed.) Can you confirm that the RPA supported
the historic payment basis?
4. The Committee would also be grateful if
you could supply us with copies of the updates and assessments
on progress towards meeting the February payment target provided
by the RPA to Ministers from January 2005 onwards. Access to such
information - on a confidential basis, if necessary - would help
ensure the Committee is able to reach properly informed conclusions
about the reasons why work on preparing for implementing the SFP
has developed in the way that it has.
5. Finally, the Committee would also be interested
in some more information about the contract agreed between the
RPA and Accenture. It is clear that one of the main causes of
the doubling of the revenue cost of the programme was the number
of changes to the specification arising from the reform of the
CAP in 2003, which also resulted in a great deal of nugatory work
on the previous payment systems. The contract was signed in January
2003, when reform of the CAP, notably the idea of introducing
decoupling, was very much in the air. Can you tell the Committee
to what extent the RPA sought to include some "elbow room"
to allow for likely changes to the payment systems to be taken
account of in the contract? Alternatively, were any steps taken
to include a "break clause" in the contract that would
have allowed the RPA to re-negotiate it on the basis of a significant
reform of the CAP, and thus of the payment system to be implemented?
I look forward to hearing from you.
Rt Hon Michael Jack MP
18 January 2006
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