Rural Payments Agency

The Secretary of State talks about using up margins of contingency, but surely there is no way of describing the matter other than as a botched introduction of the single farm payment scheme in England. That is worrying for many tens of thousands of farmers who rely on the payments for their cash flow, and for maintaining their obligations. I have no doubt that there were problems at the Rural Payments Agency of which Ministers were not aware. There can be no other explanation for the extraordinary contrast between the assurances of the Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the hon. Member for South Dorset (Jim Knight) at Question Time on 9 March and the sacking of the RPA chief executive only a week later. However, DEFRA Ministers must take their share of the blame. First, Scotland and Wales have almost finished payments on the simpler historic basis, yet DEFRA Ministers decided to implement the more fancy scheme and they must surely bear responsibility. Do they accept that their decision to abandon the historic basis of payment has been a major cause of the difficulties in England in comparison with the relative success in Scotland and Wales? Secondly, the new scheme could have been introduced with a delay, as happened in the Netherlands. Do Ministers accept that they made a mistake in trying to run before they could walk? Thirdly, do Ministers accept that the scheme’s implementation has been botched from the start, and that the evidence for that is not only in the delays that farmers are now suffering in the payments that they were promised but in the spiralling cost—from £18.1 million to £37. 4 million, as revealed by the Select Committee—of the IT system procured for the single farm payments? The Secretary of State has given no assurances about the timing of the payments that are due. We must press her for assurances for farmers who expected the bulk of the payments to be made by the end of March about when they will be made. If she cannot give them, will Ministers authorise interim payments so that farm businesses can maintain their obligations to their suppliers and creditors? Will Ministers assure us that they have contacted the principal lending institutions to the farming community and accepted full responsibility for any delays in farmers’ payments that may arise through DEFRA’s broken promises?