Select Committee on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 140-159)

MR DAVID FURSDON AND PROFESSOR ALLAN BUCKWELL

8 MAY 2006

  Q140  David Taylor: Defra and the RPA were quite intransigent on this particular point, that they wanted to have all the area claims in so that could have an aggregate, that was averaged out over the complete area so needed everything to be in before they could pay anything; that was their stance for quite a time, was it not?

  Professor Buckwell: If you have got an area element at all, you have to map all the land, however small.

  Q141  David Taylor: Of course. It might have been possible then to put 80% in to have made an interim payment based on what the information so far, maps and aggregations, had been: that would have been possible, surely?

  Professor Buckwell: I do not understand the scheme you are suggesting.

  Q142  David Taylor: That you do not need all of the data; if you have got a large sample of the data that is fully mapped and fully analysed, that you can make an interim estimate at least as to what the average might be, to be refined when all the data has been collected and mapped?

  Professor Buckwell: It sounds as though that would run into the problems, which in a sense we have got now, of validation, where there seem to be very exacting standards, that you are not able to get just rough estimates based on 80% we are not validating.

  Q143  David Taylor: Eighty per cent, say; I am just picking out a figure?

  Professor Buckwell: Even on an individual claim, if there is a dispute over two-hundredths of a hectare it is enough to stop validation. The tolerances and the precision thresholds have been set ludicrously high. The fact that is the case is shown by when a new Chief Executive of the RPA comes in, changes several of these tolerances within days and speeds the process, and it just indicates that there is a degree of searching for precision in implementing, and, I suspect, whatever system which Defra imposed on RPA which condemned this process to failure.

  Q144  David Taylor: What I think I am saying, Mr Fursdon, is that where individual claims had been ratified and validated, it would have been possible to pay interim amounts to them, based on the likely aggregate sums available?

  Mr Fursdon: I think the answer is, it might well have been, and indeed there might well have been other ways in which interim arrangements could have been made. This is where the actual interaction between the RPA and Defra and what they felt was allowable under European rules seems to have been the problem. Along with the other farming organisations, certainly we suggested, much earlier on, that interim payments could have been made on a number of different bases; but every time we came back to this idea of disallowance and going against the rules. While I understand the point you are making, I suspect that could well have fallen foul of that, because if there had to be a retrospective readjustment there was a panic if the readjustment led to payments needing to be clawed back, that they were not prepared to take that risk.

  Q145  Chairman: I just want to pick up on something you said in your evidence just a second ago, about belief in what the RPA could do. From where did you get your feedback as to what you think the RPA are capable of doing; did you have any bilateral discussions with the RPA over any aspect of the likely implementation process of the Single Farm Payment?

  Mr Fursdon: We did not have any bilateral discussions with the RPA. What we said, at almost every meeting that we had—

  Q146  Chairman: Are these the stakeholder meetings?

  Mr Fursdon: They were the stakeholder meetings, in particular.

  Q147  Chairman: That implies that there were other meetings?

  Mr Fursdon: There were other meetings; for example, the then Chief Executive of the RPA came to us, in our London office, with his Head of Operations, and met me and Allan at that; they both came to our CLA Council.

  Q148  Chairman: When was that?

  Mr Fursdon: The Council meeting was in early November last year. The meeting in Belgrave Square was, if I remember rightly, two weeks after that. Those were the sorts of meetings we had with them, but the stakeholder meetings had been going on for a while, and you will have heard about those as well.

  Q149  Chairman: The reason I ask that is, in your supplemental and very helpful evidence, you guide the Committee by saying: "We suggest you might probe more deeply about Defra's role in all this. From the very beginning, Defra have been exceptionally slow in reaching decisions." Then you talk about: "For example, the seemingly simple matter of `who is a farmer'..." Then you go on to list a number of things where Defra have been very slow. If we go back to 2003 when the Regulation was being determined, does this slowness, in your judgment, of Defra's involvement go back as far as that?

  Mr Fursdon: In my view, it goes back to the worries that we had, and I will ask Allan to amplify, because he was more involved in the stakeholder meetings than I was. I think what we had was a situation where at every opportunity we warned them that there was more work to do out there than they seemed to be acknowledging. We asked whether they had enough resources. They dismissed those sorts of questions.

  Q150  Chairman: When you say "they," let me be very specific: who are "they," who dismissed it?

  Mr Fursdon: In the case of Johnston McNeill and Ian Hewitt, those were the two people I was referring to, when I was talking to them and suggesting that they might not have enough resources to get it done, because at that particular time what they were doing was coming to us and saying, essentially, "It's all under control." I chaired the meeting with our Council, with them there, at which almost all the members of our Council were saying, "Well, my maps are completely wrong," and "So are mine," and "I've had this, that and the other wrong." There seemed to be a disconnect between what we were seeing on the ground with the reality of what was happening and the somewhat bland assurances that we were being given that there were sufficient resources to turn it round in time to make the payments on the timetable that we had been promised. That is one answer from my point of view.

  Professor Buckwell: In a sense, exactly what David just said, we can roll back months to after the announcement in February 2004 as to what the system would be, and it took us all a while to digest what that meant and how it worked. There are three levels of meetings. There are stakeholder meetings, industry fora and for a while there was a contact meeting which was chaired by a Minister.

  Q151  Chairman: Can I pick you up on a very important point of detail. You said in February 2004 you got the information; "it took us a while to work out what it meant." Does that mean to say that when Defra announced the policy they did not give you any implementation detail?

  Professor Buckwell: I would not say they did not give us any, but it is a complicated thing and to fully understand how that is going to be implemented and what has to be measured and what the forms are going to look like, this took months to clarify, in fact, we are still clarifying, there are issues which are still unclear, around fields.

  Q152  Chairman: From whom were you attempting to get these clarifications?

  Professor Buckwell: In a sense, this is the important point, in my view, and I have to say this, with hindsight. The senior Defra people backed out of this process quite early on last summer and they left it to the RPA operational staff, and in fact below the Hewitt level. The main guy who used to chair the meetings was Bill Duncan, who is now retired. It was at that sort of middle-management level, I do not know how senior he was, reasonably senior, at which the detailed discussions with stakeholders were taking place, and mostly a very productive and constructive atmosphere, until the autumn, when we all sensed it was going badly wrong. Throughout that period, as I am sure the CAAV will tell you later this afternoon, we were warning them constantly, "If there's money for having fields, there'll be a lot more fields out there."

  Q153  Chairman: How did this backing-out process manifest itself; how did you know they had backed out?

  Professor Buckwell: They were not there. The meetings initially, there was a contact group chaired by a Minister then, and the stakeholders was chaired by a very senior Defra official, David Hunter, who is now conducting one of the many reviews of the RPA.

  Q154  Chairman: Sorry; just to wind back the clock. The meetings with stakeholders started with a Minister?

  Professor Buckwell: It was called a "contact group"; they kept changing the names.

  Q155  Chairman: In other words, you started off with all the players round the table, with Larry Whitty in charge?

  Professor Buckwell: With Andrew Lebrecht, a very senior Defra official, at his side.

  Q156  Chairman: When did this gathering of the great and the good from Defra first manifest itself?

  Professor Buckwell: That was going on in the run-up to and after the announcement, is my recollection.

  Q157  Chairman: This was through 2004?

  Professor Buckwell: The end of 2003 and into early 2004. Then, in a sense, once the decisions were made, they got more technical, the senior guys did not turn up and, progressively, Hunter's level withdrew. Then there was a Head of an Implementation Unit and then it seems that the Implementation Unit fizzled out to about one person, or two people.

  Q158  Chairman: Have I understood it correctly that, whilst this gradual, receding presence of Defra, from the senior point of view, was going on, there was a mounting pile of practical questions for which there was no policy answer?

  Professor Buckwell: The honest truth is that there was a mounting pile of unprocessed applications from May onwards about which there was complete silence, and it was not until the September and October, when we were saying, "The Welsh are giving us processing statistics weekly; why can't we even have the first set of processing statistics?" and we started really pushing for having some concrete information on progress. It was not until, as David has said, we got Johnston McNeill in front of us that finally we started getting processing statistics, mid autumn. It was only then, I suspect, that Defra realised how slow the process was going.

  Mr Fursdon: Was there not also a period when the stakeholder process was stopped and we had to actually get it going again?

  Professor Buckwell: Yes. From after the applications in May 2005, the next three or four stakeholders were taken up entirely with the design of the 2006 application form, because they were very keen that we should make good progress with that, which was fine, and then the meetings stopped altogether, and it was not until we agitated—

  Q159  Chairman: Let me ask this question, and I apologise to my colleague here but you have opened up a very interesting line of questioning. As a body, you meet from time to time with Ministers, sometimes over a drink and I do not blame you for doing anything like that. With this mess sort of accumulating underneath, did either of you have one of those conversations where you said to Larry Whitty, or to Lord Bach, or whoever, "What the hell's going on here? Here we are, going to all these meetings you organise, and we're coming away with great misgivings, very worried; have you guys got any idea what's going on?"

  Mr Fursdon: We got to the stage, we did not have those discussions with Ministers through the summer of 2005, basically until, I suspect—


 
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