Rural Payments Agency

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister, but my copy arrived after the announcement was made. That may be due to vagaries that are beyond his control. This is part of the problem: so much is beyond the Minister’s control. During the debate, the Minister sought to make some capital from the fact that independent service agencies were a Conservative Party invention. That was a perfectly reasonable thing for him to do. In discussions on this subject, the Minister has said from time to time that they are independent agencies, so if they give assurances that all is well, that should presumably be instantly accepted by Ministers. I would not have commented on their independence had I not found the remarks made by the Minister’s honourable friend Mr Bradshaw in a debate in Westminster Hall yesterday. He states:"““On 20 February payments began to flow as had been forecast. However, on Friday 10 March, after fellow Ministers had requested a qualified update of actual payments being made, the RPA still advised that 51 per cent.—one could argue that that represented the bulk—would be made by 3 April and that 96 per cent. would be made by the end of June. Just four days after that, on Tuesday 14 March, at a meeting with the Secretary of State, the RPA chief executive reported for the first time that the forecast of the bulk of payments being made by the end of March would not be met. He reaffirmed that 96 per cent. of payments would be made by the end of June. The next day, on the advice of the DEFRA permanent secretary, Mr. McNeill was removed from his post””.—[Official Report, Commons, 29/3/06; col. 303WH.]" What is the independence of an agency if the head of the organisation can be instantly removed? But that is not what I want to talk about today. I merely make the point. It is fortunate that I am following the noble Earl, Lord Erroll, because he was discussing problems of mapping, which is probably at the heart of this whole disastrous affair. I am sure that no one wants to be in this Chamber today having this debate; we would all prefer that the need had not arisen. I refer to the experience of one estate owner, and the noble Earl says that the problem goes back a long way. The estate owner’s experience began in September 2003. Version one of the maps ran to some 32 pages, of which only three contained no errors. The necessary corrections to the remaining 29 pages were duly made and returned. Version two of the maps was sent in September 2004. He was told that it was the final version and that any adjustments would have to be made on the IACS 22 forms. Version three of the maps arrived on 16 March 2005, and version four on 4 April 2005. By the time he sent his SP5a form to the RPA on 10 May, the areas were still not agreed, and version five of the maps was received in May 2005. To date, there have been seven versions of the maps, none of which has been without error. By the time version six arrived, the number of errors had been reduced to six. One might think that that was progress. However, on 26 October 2005, he received version seven. Although the six errors had been corrected—hooray—something in the region of 50 new errors had crept into that version, which varied from the inclusion of tracks that appear to have been made by pigs historically crossing fields, to the disappearance of land amounting to almost 300 hectares. Following the receipt of version seven, a visit was made to the RPA offices in Reading in an endeavour to sort out the problem, and a new version of the maps was promised within two weeks. Having heard nothing by December, the landowner telephoned the office, and a promise was made that the maps would be produced by 19 January 2006. There has been no explanation why the maps for this estate cannot be printed, save that the RPA staff said on the telephone that the computer systems were unable to cope. On 2 March this year, the estate owner received the entitlement statement dated 21 February, stating that no payment could be made by the RPA until the claim was fully validated. In turn, the claim could not be fully validated until the digital mapping queries had been resolved. Over that period, the problems had gone from bad to worse rather than from bad to better. What will happen if the person’s map cannot be validated? There is virtual agreement between the landowner and the RPA, but it cannot be validated for technical reasons by the date on which the payment has to be made, lest the Government lose their subscription from the European Commission for failure to make those payments. In his opening remarks, the noble Lord, Lord King, sought assurances about time limits. The indications are that, because of the mapping problems, that question cannot be resolved, or at least the Minister will find it difficult to resolve the time issue, unless he knows something that we do not know and something has happened since this lot came out. In case it might be thought that that is the only example, which encapsulates almost every error that could go wrong, I have another one concerning someone who applied for the entry level scheme on the environmental side in May 2005. When he got his maps back, 40 hectares of land were missing. On 27 November, it was stated that his mapping problems were nearly resolved but involved ““unusual””printing, so he was told that it would take a while to complete. He phoned on 10 March to discover that the maps had been lost. There is a real technical problem here. The real difficulty that I foresee is that these technical problems may not be capable of solution before the date by which the payments are required to have been made under European law and practice. Heaven help the agricultural industry with having to deal with that as individuals, but the serious question for the Minister is: what happens if that finally proves to be the situation?