Rural Payments Agency

My Lords, I thank both noble Baronesses for their comments and questions. The noble Baroness, Lady Byford, asks what I was saying about resources. One of the initial steps that the new RPA chief executive suggested to us last week, and which we have taken up, was that we should focus more resources in the RPA on making the 2005 payments as fast as is legally possible. The RPA is a large organisation, as we have heard; it has centres all over the country. A lot of resources have already been applied to payment of the subsidy. He is suggesting that more resources should be applied to them from within the RPA. We agree with him. At the very last stage before payment it was necessary for there to be six different authorisation processes before payments could be sent. The new chief executive suggested that that number could be decreased to two. That has been implemented at once. As for whether we will have more information by the time of our debate on Thursday—I believe that the other place also is debating this issue, on Wednesday—the new chief executive is coming forward later this week to the Secretary of State and me with other proposals. He has, after all, been in position for a total of only 11 days. I hope we will be able to say something about his proposals in those debates, but I cannot guarantee that. The noble Baroness asked about the 15 May deadline for farmers to apply under the 2006 scheme. The 2006 scheme literature, including sample forms, is already on the RPA website. Forms pre-populated with data will be distributed shortly. Of course we appreciate that some farmers would wish to have additional certainty on the detail of their entitlements before submitting a claim for next year, but we can see little chance of amending the deadlines which are set in legislation agreed by all EU Agriculture Ministers. But we will see what we can do to deal with the problem that she raises.