Rural Payments Agency

The hon. Gentleman drew on the experience of Scotland and Wales, and he is right to say that they have adopted a different system—although initially they made partial payments, and I am not certain whether Scotland is yet making full payments. Wales has begun to do that. However, those systems are not only different but involve a much smaller number of claimants. The hon. Gentleman described the scheme that we introduced in England as ““more fancy””; a more accurate term would be ““more sustainable””. The hon. Gentleman spoke as if it would always be better to pursue the historic system. He is new to the portfolio and will not therefore have the subject at the front of his mind, but under the historic system, people continue, now and for the future, to be paid on the basis of what was received by someone farming the same land between 2000 and 2002. That appeared to be neither beneficial in driving farming forward to be receptive to the market, nor something with which taxpayers or farmers would be content for long. There are already rumblings in member states that have maintained the historic system about how unsatisfactory it is. This is not, therefore, a simple black-and-white question of why we did not do what it is claimed would be easier. The hon. Gentleman made a further point, and I was not sure whether it was based on information from the Select Committee report. If it was, I regret that. There is a misunderstanding that the cost of the information technology system is somehow evidence of things going wrong. The RPA was already set to undergo a programme to provide it with new IT. That was the £18 million scheme that was initially intended to be put in place. However, that was agreed before the common agricultural policy reform proposals, which obviously resulted in the need not only for a new IT system but for one that would perform a different task. That is why there is a difference, and the two sums involved are not comparable. We are not talking about twice the money for the same scheme changes. The hon. Gentleman also asked about interim payments. I can only repeat what I said earlier to the hon. Member for South-East Cambridgeshire (Mr. Paice), which is that we continue to keep that matter under review. I shall not be drawn into making forecasts, other than to draw attention to the scale of the payment window. The hon. Member for South-East Cambridgeshire referred to the speech that I made to the National Farmers Union annual conference, at which I said that payments had begun to flow on 20 February—as they had—and that I had been advised that very shortly, some £350 million would already have flowed. When I saw the chief executive of the RPA on the evening of 14 March, however, he told me that only about £60 million had been paid by that date. That was the first intimation that DEFRA Ministers had had that those were the figures involved. However, that sum was disbursed over about three and a half weeks. In the period since that date—just over a week of payment days—some £75 million has already been disbursed. That is obviously not enough, but it is certainly a big improvement on the previous figures.