Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

I beg to move, To leave out from ““House”” to the end of the Question, and to add instead thereof:"““commends the Government on its swift and effective action to deal with four different disease outbreaks in England in 2007; welcomes the announcement on 8th October 2007 of an aid package to farmers worth £12.5 million through extra support to hill farmers, fallen stock collection, meat promotion and help for farming support charities; congratulates the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) on its effective emergency planning arrangements in conjunction with the emergency services and local authorities to warn those at risk from the recent tidal surge and initiate precautionary evacuation; applauds the increase in spending on flood defences since 1997, a 30 per cent. increase in real terms to around £600 million, and the announcement that spending will rise to a maximum of £800 million by 2010-11; and further congratulates the Government for bringing together environment, rural affairs and food and farming under Defra to create a unified structure essential for the effective delivery of integrated Government policies across these issues.””." Let me tell the hon. Member for East Surrey (Mr. Ainsworth) and his hon. Friends that I genuinely welcome the opportunity he has given the Government to tell the House about DEFRA's work, although it is pretty obvious to me from the speech we have just heard that he is unaware of much of what DEFRA is doing. I can tell him, for instance, that the permanent secretary is not part-time—but first I invite the House to join me in congratulating DEFRA's chief scientist Bob Watson and the other scientists at DEFRA on the contribution that they have made to the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has been recognised in the award of this year's Nobel peace prize. It is not often that a Secretary of State is able to stand at the Dispatch Box and congratulate civil servants with whom he has the privilege of working on such recognition for, as the Norwegian Nobel committee stated,"““their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.””" If we are going to talk about the Department and its staff—and I shall have more to say on this subject—we should recognise achievements, and that is quite an achievement. I want to begin on a matter on which I can agree with the hon. Gentleman: when things go wrong we must be honest about that and put them right. I fully accept that in 2006 there were severe problems with the single farm payments to farmers. That caused deep and genuine hardship across the country and I am very sorry for what happened. However, Departments should also be judged on what they do to try to deal with problems and, as the House knows, this year the Rural Payments Agency has managed to pay 98 per cent. of payments for the second scheme year before the end of the payment window of 30 June, exceeding the target we set as part of the recovery programme, and I expect performance to continue to improve—indeed, I am determined that it will do so.