Rural Payments Agency

My Lords, I am grateful for the noble Earl’s questions. On his first question, the system that was adopted in England is not the same as that adopted in the devolved Administrations. Each was able to adopt the scheme slightly differently. England adopted a much more detailed, robust and forward-looking scheme. On paper, there is no doubt that it is the best way to go. The problem is how it has been applied in the first year. There are lessons to be learned from that. I have spent a year with responsibility for Northern Ireland. I did not deal with single payments because we were paying the money out from December. There were other issues there. The noble Earl also asked the valid question: what is stopping the payments on the last 2,300 of the 120,000 claims? Those are the large claims; there are obviously some small ones. One cannot be precise. There are still disputes about field boundaries and about more than one application for a field; in other words, two farmers claiming the same field. I am not making an excuse, but there are more than 200 probate cases in the system that will have to be removed because it takes a lot longer to deal with them. It is unfortunate, but it is a factor. I am told that, as the system currently operates, when the operator thinks the payment is ready and when it appears on the screen the snag that stopped it going out the first time has been dealt with. However, there might be another snag waiting down the line which will not be flagged up until the first one has been cleared, so you don’t know it is there. Sometimes, given how the forms are filled in, a duplicate page might be mistakenly filled in or a whole host of things can happen at the last minute. We have paid out over 90 per cent of the money, with more than 82,000 full payments and a considerable number of partial payments. We are at the tail end of some complicated, awkward cases that have built up on top of the problems caused by the delays earlier in the year. One thing has fed off another. I cannot identify for the noble Earl one single problem to be fixed which would enable us to press the button and make all the other payments. If that were the case, I could say with confidence that we could make all the payments by next Friday, but I cannot.