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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