Rural Payments Agency

I am very grateful for the clarification, my Lords. However, I have to say that I find it hard to believe. Our objective for the use of this sizeable sum of public money—some £1.6 billion a year—is to promote a truly sustainable English agriculture industry; in other words, the subsidies paid to farmers for years and years on the basis of production alone constituted a system that should have disappeared a long time ago, if we were to have a properly sustainable farming sector in this country. So I make no apology for our adoption of these measures as a result of the latest CAP reforms. I wish that the noble Lord’s government had done something to modernise farming in any way at all while they were in power. The system we are using in England is different from the model used in Scotland and Wales. They base their payments on an historic basis alone. In accordance with our hope of achieving a sustainable farming sector, we have a mixed historic and flat-rate system. Indeed, there are rumbles in EU countries that have adopted the historic system alone that they are beginning to wish that they too had a mixed system in place.