Letter from Chair to Rt Hon Hilary Benn
MP, Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
I am writing to ask you personally to take another
look at the Parliamentary Ombudsman's report on the administration
of the 2005 Single Payment Scheme (SPS), Cold Comfort, and to
reconsider your Department's response to it.
We were deeply concerned by the evidence we
heard last week from your Permanent Secretary, which seemed to
show that the Department and the Ombudsman are effectively speaking
at cross-purposes. In particular, we are not convinced that the
Department's response shows a full understanding of the Ombudsman's
report, of the nature of her role or of her approach to issues
of this kind.
Our role is to consider reports from the Ombudsman,
and we have experience both of the majority of cases, in which
the Government accepts the Ombudsman's recommendations in full,
and the minority in which it does not. The case we were considering
last week was almost unprecedented, in that Defra has refused
to implement the Ombudsman's recommendations for financial compensation,
in a context where these recommendations are modest. Generally,
where the Government hesitates to implement the Ombudsman's recommendations,
this is because very large sums of public money are involved:
for example, in the recent investigations relating to occupational
pensions and Equitable Life, where billions of pounds were potentially
at stake.
We were mystified before last week's session
as to why it could be to the Government's advantage to resist
the Ombudsman's findings in this case. Frankly, we are none the
wiser now. The Ombudsman is recommending modest compensation in
a small number of cases. There can be little or no risk of a snowball
effect—as the Ombudsman told us, her work is subject to
a statutory time bar, and she finds it hard to imagine the circumstances
in which she would now agree to investigate any further cases
relating to 2005-06.
The reasons Defra has provided explaining its
position give the impression of a Department looking for arguments
to dispute the Ombudsman's findings. These arguments at times
seem to be based on a misunderstanding, and at other times seem
to be predicated on taking an adversarial rather than a common-sense,
compassionate approach to people who have undoubtedly suffered
injustice as a result of the Department's administrative failings.
The general arguments raised also do not seem to engage with the
detail of the individual cases investigated by the Ombudsman.
The reason put forward most strongly by Defra
for dismissing outright financial compensation for Mr W and Mr
Y (the lead complainants), is that the Ombudsman has calculated
this compensation "on the basis of the target date for 96.14%
(and later "bulk") of payments to be paid from March
2006". We have four comments on this argument which we think
need to be taken into account.
(i) The most general point to make is that the
Ombudsman has expressly denied that this is the basis on which
she has assessed compensation. See paragraph 182 of her report.
(ii) We have seen no evidence to show that Defra
has considered whether it was the specific series of administrative
errors suffered by individual complainants that meant that they
did not receive their payments by the end of March 2006, rather
than the more general problems affecting the administration of
the scheme.
(iii) We do not know if Defra has considered
whether individual complainants were led to believe in their personal
contacts with RPA (rather than from more general statements) that
they would receive their payments by the end of March 2006.
(iv) There are a range of factors set out in
the Ombudsman's report other than non-payment of SPS entitlements
as grounds for financial compensation. Even if the Department
is determined that there should be no compensation for SPS payments
made before the regulatory deadline, it is not evident to us that
Defra has considered these other factors, which include:
— lost opportunities for the farmers
to plan their affairs with adequate information to hand, including
the financial impact on Mr W of not receiving his Single Payment
Scheme entitlement statement by the regulatory deadline of 31
December 2005, for example in terms of access to credit, pressure
from existing creditors and willingness to take on new debt,
— the extent to which the mapping problems
encountered by Mr Y reasonably led him to delay his Entry Level
Stewardship claim, and
— costs to the complainants in pursuing
their complaints, for example, in their own time, in telephone
calls, in photocopying and in professional fees.
The Ombudsman's job is to be an independent,
expert investigator where citizens complain that they have suffered
injustice as a result of public bodies providing a poor service.
The Government's response ought to be based on a presumption that
the Ombudsman has got it right, particularly as in this case where
the Ombudsman has had no shortage of opportunity to consider the
Government's views on her draft findings before she has finalised
her report. It does not seem to us that Defra has been working
from this standpoint.
Where the Government disagrees with the Ombudsman's
approach to remedy, it should have strong, politically defensible
reasons for doing so. We are not persuaded that such reasons exist
in this case.
I hope that you will meet the Ombudsman as soon
as possible to discuss her report and her Office's relations with
your Department, and immediately afterwards reconsider the Department's
response. If there has been no new announcement from the Department
by the end of the month, we will need to consider asking you to
explain the existing position to us in public early in March.
I hope, however, that this will not be necessary.
2 February 2010
|
