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I was moving on to refer to the first of two of our core concerns at the heart of this saga. DEFRA Ministers selected the dynamic hybrid model in the knowledge that it was inherently more complex and risky, and one of our recommendations dealt with that. A related concern was that the amendment of the original dynamic hybrid model so soon after it was announced, by adding a third region, reinforced our conclusion that the wider implications of the dynamic hybrid model had not been
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thought through. I expected the Government to respond in some detail to either or both of those key concerns. In fact, however, they have not. Answer is there none. There is no observation, no comment, no response, no rationale, no apology, no justification, or even objection, to the points made. I found that rather disappointing.

In the general sense, the Government say that policy development of the dynamic hybrid was “inclusive and fluid”. I think that that is a new phrase that will enter the parliamentary lexicon: “inclusive”, meaning that all God’s children are consulted, and “fluid”, meaning that none of them are listened to. What emerges—the fluidity—is a shapeless form that cannot be recognised or measured, and does not perform.

In relation to our final concern, we asserted to various witnesses that it should have been obvious at the start that the dynamic hybrid model was impossible to deliver in the time scales flagged up by Mr. Andy Lebrecht. The date escapes me, but I think that the Chairman referred to it a moment or two ago. The RPA’s record until 2006 raised questions about its ability to deliver. According to what rumours suggest about the Government’s reaction to our report, they will say that it is clear with hindsight that the RPA’s ability to deliver was overstretched.

Mr. Paice: On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I think that I am in a small minority, in that I cannot refer even obscurely to the Government’s response to this report. It is quite obvious that most hon. Members have it. I know that it is for the Committee to publish it, but it seems to me that the hon. Gentleman is obscuring only slightly the source of everything that he is saying. I suggest to you that it is putting a number of us at a great disadvantage.

Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Michael Lord): I am afraid that it is not for the Chair to decide on these matters. I understand that a report has not yet been produced for the House, but as always in this kind of debate, it is important that any documents necessary for the debate ought to be before the House.

Mr. Paice: Further to that point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Am I not right in saying that a Government response belongs to the Committee, and that until the Committee publishes it, it cannot be made available to hon. Members who are not in that Committee? In such circumstances, is it right for a member of the Committee to refer to it in debate when it cannot be accessible for those of us who also wish to participate?

Mr. Deputy Speaker: The hon. Gentleman has stated the position as far as the Committee and its report are concerned precisely and absolutely correctly, and it really is for the hon. Member for North-West Leicestershire (David Taylor), who is addressing the House, to decide how much he should use what is available to him.

David Taylor: I am grateful to you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, and in reaction to that point, I shall move on.

Sir Peter Soulsby: Does my hon. Friend agree that it is most unfortunate that the Government’s response to this important report and the criticism within it was not made available to the Committee in good time? The Committee was not, therefore, able to report it to the House so that it could inform the debate.


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David Taylor: That is indeed unfortunate. I have just looked at the date on the report: 21 March 2007. A quick calculation suggests that that is some 16 or 17 weeks ago, and I would have thought that an adequate time in which to respond. However, in deference to the point made by the hon. Member for South-East Cambridgeshire (Mr. Paice), which is fair, I shall move on.

My final, core concern in the report relates to our observations about Accenture, the IT supplier of choice, and those observations are in the public domain. In the published report, which is available to the House, we said:

That is a masterpiece of understatement, although accurate in its own right. It could be said that Accenture designed the brakes and steering system for the SPS bus that careered over the ravine, but has been exculpated merely by saying that it designed the bus to be unresponsive to the brakes and the steering wheel because that is what the customer wanted. It therefore asks how it could be held responsible for the design, given that it was delivering to the specification.

Sir Peter Soulsby: I am sure that my hon. Friend recalls that Accenture’s contract was worth something in the region of £54 million, and that when it gave evidence to the Committee, despite having been paid such a large sum and apparently being at the heart of the project, it tried to absolve itself of responsibility for the system’s lack of delivery. I will not refer to the response that the House has not yet received—but does he agree that the attempt by Accenture to abdicate from responsibility requires a full response from the Government?

David Taylor: I agree. Accenture’s role in the matter has been underestimated, and it should be held responsible in a more substantial way than it has been so far.

In our report, we examined the Hunter review, which began with a study by Corven Consulting at a cost of more than £500,000. Paragraph 143 criticised that. The example is emblematic of the use of consultants. The contract was almost open-ended, the objectives were unclear and the potential for making substantial profits for delivering little was there throughout the process of using Corven Consulting. We need to get a grip on that in phase 2 of the Labour Government as they enter their next 10 or 12 years in office.

The Hunter review stated that no structural changes should be made to the RPA that would jeopardise the target of achieving a stable SPS by the 2008 scheme year. It urged the RPA to focus on that target. I hope that that will happen. The process was to take seven years, with only 10 per cent. linked to the flat rate in the first year. It was always possible for that first year—2005—to have a 0 per cent. flat rate and to move to a 100 per cent. flat rate over a five-year period, thus leading to full implementation of the system by 2010 rather than 2012. If that had happened, disaster would not have been visited on the rural community.

The Hunter review said that in the slightly longer term, beyond 2008, the RPA should commit itself to making the SPS application process by e-channel—
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effectively online—and that it would not be credible to make a commitment until the SPS was stable. We must expect delay until we have stability.

Let us be a bit more positive. The RPA is in recovery mode. The National Farmers Union has supplied detailed and regular briefings on the topic, which are balanced, fair and helpful. It says that there is a long way to go but that performance in 2006 has been much better than in 2005. A flood of money was distributed in February and March this year, and the target of making 96 per cent. of payments by the end of June was met.

Mr. Jack: However, there are still 20,000 farmers with 2005 payments who do not know whether they received the right money.

David Taylor: That is true. One of the costs of giving priority to the 2006 claims process was leaving 20,000 farmers in limbo, with payments uncorrected, and in some cases unmade. We will not know the effect on those individual claims for some months.

The NFU acknowledges that the RPA is much improved and that better systems and reporting are in place. There is a greater customer focus—thank goodness for that—because one of the main themes that came through from witness after witness to our inquiry was that under the previous arrangements, at least they could talk to someone—a stable, experienced career civil servant or agricultural specialist in a DEFRA regional office—who knew something about the system.

Mr. Gray: I hope that the hon. Gentleman is right in saying that the system is much more customer focused and that there is a greater readiness to listen to farmers. However, I was dismayed by a visit to the House of Commons today by my constituents Mr. and Mrs. Young of Pound farm in Purton, because they are among the 2 per cent. who have not been paid at all for last year. They have been missed out completely. They ring the RPA every day—sometimes twice a day—yet they say that they are unable to discover why they have not been paid and what they now have to do. They do not believe that the RPA is customer focused at all.

David Taylor: That is true for a minority of the 120,000 or so claims. I was citing the NFU reaction, which is recognition of a greater customer focus. The NFU represents those making the 120,000 claims, although that includes a small number of people in the position that the hon. Gentleman describes.

Jonathan Shaw: I should like to inform hon. Members that my noble Friend Lord Rooker holds his weekly surgery tomorrow in W3 at 1 o’clock. Any Member can go along with specific cases. He would be pleased to hear about cases such as the one that the hon. Member for North Wiltshire (Mr. Gray) has cited.

David Taylor: One of the most useful initiatives taken when my noble Friend took over as Minister with responsibility for farmers has been his surgeries. Many hon. Members have used them; they are an effective innovation, on which we congratulate him. Some problems continue: the RPA is still working with
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poor-quality data, there are genuine quality control problems at the processing end, and there is a lack of technical knowledge in the RPA of how the SPS works.

The Government must ensure that the RPA is adequately resourced. We have experienced doing things down to a price, not up to a standard. My hon. Friend the Member for Brecon and Radnorshire—as I shall continue to call him—knows that one of the early impressions that we gained from what we saw at Reading was that the place was full of contractors and outsourced staff, who were low-paid and poorly trained. The people who knew about the processes were demoralised by the large-scale redundancies that they had to endure. Even though the RPA would cost even more in the short term, money spent on that would be money well spent in the medium and long term. Of course, 20,000 or so 2005 claims need reviewing as soon as possible.

My heart sank when I realised the RPA was to carry out an across-the-board update of its rural land register. Given all the problems that it experienced in the early months of mapping, and the appalling delivery of RLR maps in 2004, I am not certain that all that will not be repeated if the SPS system does not reach a stable state. The remapping must be done with great caution, but I advise, from a technical point of view, that it should be delayed into the medium term, until the SPS system, which it underpins, is significantly more stable.

I hope that everything will be done in the short term for the 2007 scheme payments. Lord Rooker said that the objective was to pay 75 per cent. by the end of March 2008. We should go further and faster. I believe—and the NFU agrees—that we should pay at least 80 per cent. of the claims by the end of the year. That is a reasonable target. The system is becoming more effective and the staff are becoming more familiar with it. Let us not allow change to disrupt that. We should accelerate the payments so that the 120,000 farmers and their families throughout the country do not have to endure again what happened from early 2006 to mid 2007.

8.18 pm

Mr. Roger Williams (Brecon and Radnorshire) (LD): As the right hon. Member for Fylde (Mr. Jack) said, it is a great pleasure to debate agriculture on the Floor of the House. The Government and the Opposition appear reluctant to use the time available for that. The production of good, safe and secure food, the protection of the environment and opportunities for the public to enjoy the countryside are important for the nation.

I congratulate the Under-Secretary on his appointment. I am sure that he will enjoy participating in a fast-moving sector of industry. Many changes have taken place in the recent past, and more and rapid changes will happen in the near future. I would also like to place on record my declarations of my farming interests that appear in the register.

In preparing for this debate, I thought that it would be interesting to consider the farming industry through the eyes of the younger person. It is impossible for me to do that, given the stage of my career in the industry, so I spent some time talking to young farmers at the royal show, at NFU conferences and in other locations. The average person who would be expected to go into
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the agricultural industry looks at it in a despondent and unhappy frame of mind. Young people look at the returns and at the commitment necessary to do the job properly, and they see that the two just do not add up. When they see their friends and acquaintances going into other professions, they are discouraged from going into farming. Indeed, at a time when farming is being encouraged to be more business-like, to prepare business plans and to set out cash flows, young people were doubly disappointed that DEFRA could not deliver the single payment when it was expected. They do not want to do business with an organisation that cannot pay on time.

The right hon. Member for Fylde went through a number of the conclusions of our inquiry, but it is impossible to set out the scale of DEFRA’s failure in this matter: one only has to consider the other countries in the European Union and the devolved Administrations in the United Kingdom to see how they delivered. They adopted different approaches to the single farm payment, as the regulations permitted. Some adopted the dynamic hybrid, some adopted an area payment straight away and some adopted an historic payment. However, almost without exception, other countries managed to deliver the majority of the payments early in the payment window, which extends from 1 November to 30 June. Most countries were able to deliver within the first two months of that window. The purpose of the window is not to spread the payments; it is to deal with the difficult applications that every scheme will throw up from time to time.

No one would criticise any organisation or country delivering the scheme for being cautious about disbursing public money if there was a doubt about an application. There is no advantage to any country in holding on to the money. No interest accrues to the Treasury of a country, because the money is drawn down from the European Union as the claims are disbursed. There is, in fact, every encouragement for the money and the claims to be dealt with quickly, because that releases staff to prepare the next round of payments. DEFRA fell apart between the 2005 and 2006 applications.

When we took evidence, it quickly became clear to me that the real problem was that DEFRA had decided to adopt a dynamic hybrid at the same time as the change agenda was being taken forward in the Rural Payments Agency. I can understand why DEFRA wanted to go for an area payment scheme, rather than the historic payment scheme, which would more securely decouple support from production. I have no criticism about the extent of that ambition. However, if DEFRA had conducted a risk analysis of the difficulties of delivering not just an area payment scheme or an historic scheme but the dynamic hybrid, that would surely have sent waves of caution through the organisation.

At the same time as DEFRA decided to take forward a dynamic hybrid, change was taking place in the RPA. That change programme, if successful, was going to lead to a reorganisation and substantial savings in public expenditure. The two processes coming together was, I believe, the cause of the problem in delivering the scheme. Indeed, I would not be surprised if the Government said something along those lines in their response to our inquiry.


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I visited the RPA in Reading with my hon. Friend the Member for North-West Leicestershire (David Taylor), as I call him. It was clear that it had been necessary to compensate for the reduction of staff there by employing temporary operatives. The training period necessary for them to become conversant with the system was such that some left before they were fully trained. It was clear to us that the mapping system was a cause of the problems, and one that it would be difficult to overcome.

The relationship between DEFRA, the RPA and Accenture should be re-examined and lessons learned for future IT programmes, because the necessary engagement to make the most of the available talent and resources seemed to be lacking. Indeed, the lack of direct meetings between the RPA chief executive and the then Secretary of State was one of the things that seemed to contribute to failure. At a time when the project was in such trouble, that direct contact was lacking.

Mr. Philip Dunne (Ludlow) (Con): Does the hon. Gentleman agree that it is little short of astonishing that the chief executive of the Rural Payments Agency had only two meetings with the Secretary of State, one of which was on the day before he was suspended, when the whole debacle came to an end? What accountability is there when, essentially, the Secretary of State washes her hands of the whole business?

Mr. Williams: I agree with the hon. Gentleman. With failure on the horizon and the farming community in desperation about when it would receive the payments, it seems beyond belief that the Secretary of State could not manage to meet the chief executive of the organisation that was attempting to deliver them.

Mr. Richard Bacon (South Norfolk) (Con): My hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow (Mr. Dunne) and I have just listened to the former chief executive of the Rural Payments Agency, Johnston McNeill, giving evidence to the Public Accounts Committee, which is one of the reasons we were unable to attend the debate earlier. On the question of where the Secretary of State was, I am pretty sure that she was steering well clear. On the hon. Gentleman’s earlier point about the relationships between DEFRA, the agency and Accenture, does he not find it strange, as I do, that there were two senior responsible owners, against the advice of the RPA, when the whole idea of having a senior responsible owner for a project is that there should be one person who is specifically accountable? It was as though the Department had tried to drive a coach and horses through the notion of having a senior responsible owner by having one for policy and one for implementation, thereby almost creating part of the problem.

Mr. Williams: I agree with the hon. Gentleman. There seemed to be a lack of accountability and clarity about who was responsible for carrying the project forward.


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