Examination of Witnesses (Questions 160-179)
MR DAVID
FURSDON AND
PROFESSOR ALLAN
BUCKWELL
8 MAY 2006
Q160 David Taylor: Were they formal
meetings, or informal?
Mr Fursdon: We did not actually
have formal meetings in that period. My predecessor had some meetings.
I took over as President of the CLA at the beginning of November,
so I was not involved in those meetings. I am not entirely sure
what my predecessor may or may not have said in private, but certainly
we did not have public meetings which addressed these issues,
other than it was one of the issues that we were talking about.
When we started to get seriously concerned was, first of all,
when we started to get stakeholder meetings up and running again,
and then when we had Johnston McNeill come both to our Council
and to see us privately we started to get so seriously concerned
that we asked whether we could start having some, if you like,
resuscitation of the contact group, the actual ministerial meetings.
Those ministerial meetings actually, in the recent past, have
been happening again, but only really from a stage when they started
to accept and acknowledge that they were in trouble.
Q161 Chairman: It would be accurate
to say that as we neared the mounting pile of problems so the
amount of contact between you, as a representative body, and those
who were involved at the heart of the process actually diminished?
Mr Fursdon: It diminished, in
terms of those that were dealing with the stakeholders. We had
no greater nor less contact with the Ministers through this period
than otherwise would have been the case until it was ratcheted
up when they realised they were going to start missing the deadlines
and they realised they really were in trouble, which was probably,
I cannot remember exactly but I should think, January or February
of this year.
Q162 David Taylor: Right at the heart
of the problems that we have seen over the last few months was,
at least to the RPA, the unexpectedly high volume of applications.
You acknowledged that the 70,000 IACS have grown to 120,000, but
you are relatively unsympathetic, in that you say that they should
have been aware of 20,000-ish specialist milk and sheep producers,
I think, and that 30,000 is the real growth. Am I paraphrasing
your attitude reasonably accurately?
Professor Buckwell: That is the
essence, yes, absolutely. Even the other group, once you decide,
as they did, as an act of policy, in February 2004, to incorporate
a land-based approach, a flat rate, a regional average payment
approach—
Q163 David Taylor: That is what has
been described to us?
Professor Buckwell: Exactly; they
have statistics on holdings and these things. There is no reason
on earth why they did not know it was tens of thousands and not
just one or two hundred, for example. Likewise, it is Defra who,
in a sense, does the mapping of this land, of this country, and
they know what the area is; the statistics are pretty ropey, but
they knew as well as anybody how much land, within orders of magnitude,
they were likely to capture. There is no reason whatsoever for
them to say they were surprised that there were a lot more applicants
and there was a lot more land; it was their policy precisely to
do that.
Q164 David Taylor: Were you asked
by either Defra or the RPA what the volume of new applications
might be? Even if you were not asked, why did you not contribute
your estimate you have just given?
Professor Buckwell: I can show
you an e-mail trade—I cannot actually, because they destroy
their e-mails—where I was asking them constantly for their
estimates of data, but this is treated as state secrets, that
are not allowed to share land areas.
Q165 Chairman: When did you first
start this bombardment of requests for information?
Professor Buckwell: In February,
or even before the announcement, when all the rumouring was about
what sort of system and how much land; this is intensely interesting,
this is what we are here for, to understand the application of
the system.
Q166 Chairman: Which February; was
this 2005?
Professor Buckwell: It was 2004.
Our members need to be informed about the effects of policies
and we try to estimate it.
Mr Fursdon: One of the things
certainly, and I have not been involved in it in quite so much
technical detail as Allan has been but the impression that I have
had at each stage is that we have been a slight irritation to
the process and that really they know best and that our questions
are a slight annoyance to them because they know what they are
doing. This is certainly the impression that we had throughout
the whole process, "We know what we're up to; stop bothering
us, stop fussing us with this, we're in control, it's all going
fine. Don't keep asking us all these questions," and then
you got the impression that every so often there would be a consultation,
a rather sort of set-piece consultation with you. That is something
I think is a process that has been quite prevalent.
Q167 Chairman: Could you be very
specific and tell me, Professor Buckwell, to whom you started
your flow of questions; who were these aimed at, was it a named
official?
Professor Buckwell: It would be
to named officials in both RPA and Defra.
Q168 Chairman: It would be very helpful
to us to know whom. I appreciate you have not got the e-mails
and that is completely understandable, but it would be very helpful,
in terms of providing an audit trail for us, to know who was the
recipient of your requests for information?
Professor Buckwell: The Economics
Department of Defra, because they are the people who gather the
economics and statistics on the sector, and as soon as we start
talking about regional payments, we would like to estimate how
big they might be, which needs an estimate of the area, so there
is a discussion and e-mail traffic.
Q169 David Taylor: Were we to ask
Defra and RPA for the audit trail, as the Chairman has described
it, of correspondence with yourselves, you would be very relaxed
and supportive about that?
Professor Buckwell: Yes.
Q170 David Taylor: To press on briefly,
to finish off on volume, Chairman, before returning the baton
to you, I asserted, rather than actually justified, that the delays
were due substantially to an increase in volume of applications
over and above that which they might have had in any plan which
they created. Do you agree that is a reasonable thing for me to
have said?
Professor Buckwell: Of course;
and it makes sense, if you have more customers it is going to
take longer, but all I would ask is, I would like to see an analysis
of where the real difficulties have been. In a sense, this is
what your inquiry, I hope, is going to get to the bottom of, but
I think the decision to digitise the mapping and to include environmental
features and to change the environmental schemes, and all at the
same time, all the demands on the Rural Land Register, was a task,
given their IT system and the way it is managed, which was simply
too big for those resources to cope with. In other words, the
fact that it has gone wrong and has taken much longer than anybody
thought is not just because of the additional number of customers.
Q171 David Taylor: You said something
interesting, amongst a lot of things which were interesting, particularly
interesting, a few moments ago, when you said that when you make
more money available for fields more fields will appear. Do you
stick by that?
Professor Buckwell: Of course.
That is the nature of policy systems and incentive systems.
Q172 David Taylor: The point I would
make is how closely is that tied to there being a very low, de
minimis measurement, of 0.3 of a hectare, or something like
that; had that been raised?
Professor Buckwell: This is a
European Regulation and it has to cope with the pocket handkerchief
size plots in farms in other Member States, and so you cannot
have different minimal requirements for different Member States,
apparently.
Q173 David Taylor: Because there
will be a larger number of beneficiaries of CAP funds, has that
had any corresponding change in your own membership; have you
had people pressure you?
Mr Fursdon: No; it has not really.
In terms of our membership, our membership has been roughly the
same for the last few years, it has not increased or decreased
really, it has stayed much the same.
Q174 David Taylor: The mix of members,
the land-holdings they have, this sort of thing has not been a
factor?
Mr Fursdon: We have not been able
to find any trend that would link any changes in our membership
numbers with what has gone on here. The point that you raise,
yes, there are more people and therefore that takes more time.
My point is that actually if they have a task, which is they have
decided to go down a certain route which involves mapping, and
so on, they have got that task, what resources have they got in
order to achieve that task, whether human, IT or anything else,
then the third question is how long have they got to do it, and
we knew when they were trying to get these payments out, and it
is a combination of the interaction of those three things. Yes,
more claims will mean the task is greater, but our contention
is that should have been obvious to a Department which is tasked
with dealing with these things and dealing with payments and dealing
with the environment and mapping, and all the rest of it. Having
got that, so two of the three variables were fixed, what the task
should have been and when it had to be done by, therefore the
one that had to be fixed was the resources one and how the resources
were going to help them achieve that.
Q175 David Taylor: There were lots
of "they" in there; they, Defra, they, the RPA, they,
Ministers?
Mr Fursdon: They, the RPA, who
designed the system, to follow what they, Defra, had laid down
as the task that they wanted achieved.
Q176 Chairman: Just on a point of
detail, there was the overarching Regulation to introduce the
decoupled payments scheme and then there were some implementing
Regulations. In terms of the kind of detail which Mr Taylor has
just been exploring, for example, your postage stamp, pocket handkerchief
pieces of land, was that agreed within the discussions on the
implementing Regulation?
Professor Buckwell: That was in
the Regulation.
Chairman: That was in the Regulation.
The reason I ask that question is that one of our witnesses put
it to us that, had Defra decided early enough that it was going
to go down the dynamic hybrid route, in some way it could have
re-engaged, and I use the word advisedly, in the process of discussion
about the Regulation to have influenced it in some way, as my
colleague said. In other words, to put in a de minimis
larger than the present. If I have understood you correctly, Professor
Buckwell, they could have engaged in that, but perhaps they did
not?
Professor Buckwell: I am not completely
certain of this. I thought it was in the Regulation. Most of these
Regulations, in a sense, flow on from the predecessor Regulations
and it has always been the case that the threshold for getting
agricultural subsidies was very small, I assume the logic is because
you have got a lot of very small holdings in other Member States
and who would not like half of their farms to be excluded by having
a much higher threshold.
Mr Fursdon: Certainly under the
old IACS system you were doing it to two decimal places in hectares,
on the old IACS forms.
Professor Buckwell: These are
excuses; ex-post rationalisations of the fact that we have got
a badly-managed system, and there is no reason on earth why 120,000
applications cannot be processed in a matter of a few months.
It is not rocket science.
Q177 David Taylor: We have not necessarily
bought this rationale, we are just letting you have a say.
Professor Buckwell: Yes, I understand.
Q178 Chairman: Our task, Professor
Buckwell, is literally to sort the wheat from the chaff and so
we have to review with each of our witnesses what other people
have said to sort out the difference between excuse, conjecture,
rumour and hard fact. I am delighted that you are rebutting that
and you have come back to the central point that you made at the
beginning. In your written evidence, and just following on from
the line of inquiry on this volume, you comment, and I quote:
"We understand that the system" meaning the IT system
"simply could not cope with the number of operators who required
to be online simultaneously and thus it continually crashed leaving
operatives drumming their fingers." This feedback on the
volume effect of the IT system, is that anecdotal from your members,
or did you have any feedback from somebody on the inside of the
RPA?
Professor Buckwell: That particular
and the drumming of the fingers literally came from a member who
managed to get inside Reading and watch them as they processed.
You have heard these stories, the fields are on, they are off,
they are on, they are somebody else's fields, on; it is an unstable
system that does not do what it says on the tin it ought to do.
This member got in there and he watched this and he watched the
system go down and literally everybody sitting there, just waiting,
they cannot do anything, and you can imagine the frustration of
the operators, who are professional people, trying to cope with,
essentially, a lousy IT system.
Mr Fursdon: I have to say that
in our discussions with Johnston McNeill and Ian Hewitt there
was an acknowledgement that the system crashed from time to time.
I cannot remember whether it was a discussion in the margins of
our invitation to them to attend our Council, or whether it was
in the bilateral meeting we had with them in Belgrave Square,
but at one or other of those meetings there was an acknowledgement
of the IT crashing, which seems to bear out what Allan was saying
came from this member about it.
Q179 Chairman: Just before we move
from this area, you have given us a picture to date of growing
unease, going back to 2004, and you have also indicated that your
main points of contact, over that period, about the policy implementation
were with various officials from Defra, subsequently with the
RPA. During that period, between the agreement of the Regulation
in 2004 and the wheel falling off at the end of 2005, did you
formally communicate your organisation's concerns to Ministers
by means of correspondence?
Mr Fursdon: I am not sure that
we did to Ministers by correspondence. We certainly did to the
RPA Chief Executive by correspondence, by correspondence on several
occasions, concluding with Peter Kendall of the NFU and myself
writing a joint open letter to him about the shambles.
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