Single Payment Scheme

: I agree entirely and I hope that the Government will learn that lesson wholesale. We must go forward. I entirely agree with the hon. Member for Vale of York (Miss McIntosh) that farmers are suffering. They have been suffering for some time because we have already delayed the payments considerably. Under the old system the payments would be being banked. Farmers have already had to wait and I have never been satisfied with the idea that the banks are expected to take the strain. When farmers are indebted through no fault of their own, they have to go to the banks and build up large debts on which they are expected to pay interest in the long term. The hon. Lady's call for some compensation and understanding is morally justifiable and I hope that the Secretary of State will take account of it. I have already rehearsed my other point about who is entitled to claim the payments. It is depressing that, according to the figures, we are dealing with a much greater number of people than was calculated when the IT system was set up. Someone, somewhere got that wrong and there is a real problem in the way in which we define farming in this country. It was bad enough under the old system, but we seem to have found another system whereby people whom I do not define as farmers and who do not need the income to be able to carry on with their everyday life are putting in claims. The problem is that one claim cannot be settled until they have all been settled. That is a fundamental flaw in the system. I knew that interim payments would not be popular, but at least that was a way of guaranteeing that those farmers who had received payments in the past and needed the payments to carry on with their everyday farming would receive them. There should have been some way in which that system could be brought forward. Yet many new people are now seeking entitlement and I have serious misgivings about the quasi-market that is developing whereby people farm entitlements, not produce. We have learned nothing from milk quotas: we are creating disaster for the future, when the entitlements will be worth something but potentially will be divorced from the land. I know that it should not happen that way, and that the Select Committee has been assured that the system will be so clever that it will work. However, the way that it has been set up so far has not been a great success. I shall leave the issue, as I know that others want to say much more about it, but I am not at all confident about relying on an IT system to deal with policy, or to deliver the policy to fruition. My hon. Friend the Member for North-West Leicestershire (David Taylor) and the hon. Member for Brecon and Radnorshire (Mr. Williams) have looked at this much more carefully, and I hope that they will catch your eye in due course, Mr. Benton. What we learned was that perhaps it is unfair to blame only the IT company, as it was forced to deal with attributes that were different from those that were originally set up.