Single Payment Scheme

: That is a fair point, and the Minister will have heard it. In my experience the 80–20 rule comes into play. Once the system is broadly in place, perhaps 20 per cent. of the administrative effort will handle 80 per cent. of the cases that the system is designed to process, but substantial and disproportionate amounts of effort will be needed for some of the more complex cases. It would be a serious and fundamental mistake to extrapolate the situation at some date in late May, mid-June or whenever from the figures that I cited earlier about 23 per cent. of claimants having been dealt with by yesterday. I shall make two further points, and then sit down because so many people want to speak. The RPA and its senior management massively and negligently underestimated the work involved. That was clear from day one, from the first few seconds when we walked through the door of the RPA office in Reading. I do not hold responsible the middling ranks of staff at the RPA in Reading and elsewhere. They have worked tremendously hard under the worst possible circumstances, such as the threat of redundancy, the use of agency staff and a lack of clear information. That process was driven by Accenture, which I hold rather more responsible than my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud does. The fact that its revenue costs have doubled during the development period of the system is absolutely dreadful. I hope that the Minister and the Government will learn from that, and cool their ardent love affair with the private sector in the design and implementation of large-scale IT systems. I ask the Minister to listen to the people in the departments concerned, and involve them in the process. They have given their lives, careers, energy and commitment for a very long period to their area of interest: in this case, the RPA IT application system. Listen to them; do not be too persuaded by the blandishments of firms like Accenture. I do not hold responsible the middling ranks of people in the RPA. Finally, the farming community, this House and the taxpayer deserve a full explanation of why interim payments could not have been made and could not have been built into the timetable for all claimants. The fact that there was a need to calculate all payments before any payment can be made was absolutely barmy. It flies in the face of logic and the face of finance. It would have been possible to pay three quarters of the estimated amount and allow for the fact that there would be a variability in other things still to be calculated. That was wrong, and I hope that future Ministers in other Departments and in other Administrations will learn from the debacle we have seen during the past 21 months.