Single Payment Scheme

: The hon. Gentleman makes a good point. I am sometimes told that the money is drawn from the EU as it is paid, but even if the Government are not accruing interest, the European Union certainly is. The money is being kept somewhere. Interest accrued should surely be passed on to farmers. A large window was set by the EU for payments, between 1 November and 31 June, but it was not the intention that it should be used to delay the main payments under the scheme. The window was set so that some of the difficult and complex applications that would result from a new scheme could be dealt with. It was always intended that payments should be made at the beginning of the window rather than the end. It was always open to DEFRA to delay the implementation of the scheme for a year. DEFRA decided against that, even though it was clear that the scheme was more complex than previous schemes. Some countries decided not to decouple during the first year—France is one. I believe that DEFRA took the decision because it was at the forefront of advocating a decoupled system, and it felt that it had to implement it in full rather than delaying it for a year. However, DEFRA did not do the necessary investigative work to find out how many applicants there might be for an entirely new scheme—for instance, potato growers and horticulturalists who keep land not entirely for agricultural purposes.