Rural Payments Agency

My Lords, it was the noble Baroness’s government who set up the introduction of arm’s-length delivery agencies as one of the major Civil Service reforms of the 1980s. The RPA is precisely one of those arm’s-length delivery agencies—even though it may have been created well after that time, we are dealing with such an agency. This agency’s job is to pay out these sums. It is for Ministers to get advice from such agencies and to take action accordingly. All the advice we had from the agency up until Tuesday evening of 14 March was that the bulk of payments would be made by the end of March. Earlier advice from the agency was that we would begin payments in February. That advice was right; we did begin payments of the single payment subsidy on 20 February. The advice on bulk payments was wrong. Ministers first heard about it on 14 March.