I am grateful to you for setting that out, Mr Havard, but I have to say that anyone who hopes to follow all the ramifications and tergiversations of the common agricultural policy negotiations will need those pieces of paper in front of them in order to have any chance of understanding much of what we are talking about. Having said that, let us try to express ourselves.
I will now be even more runic, because the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Dr Whiteford) asked me about the effect of the rebate. Anyone who tries to explain how the rebate works inevitably ends up confusing absolutely everybody. I will simply say something about it, hopefully without entering into a longer discussion, because we will all get confused.
If part of pillar one is greened, that will not affect the rebate. Even if we manage to secure a transfer of the greened component from pillar one to pillar two, it still would not have any impact, because all pillar one expenditure and all pillar two expenditure originating in pillar one counts toward the rebate calculation. I hope that the hon. Lady finds that helpful. Looking at her, I am not sure whether she does. Again, I can provide further information later if she likes.
I move to one of the key underlying issues of this debate: the Committee’s ambitions for simplicity and flexibility. Those are fundamental to the Government’s position on greening. We seek to ensure that the administrative burden is low for both farmers and administrators. For farmers’ sake, we do not want to gold-plate—as my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton called it—any proposals introduced, but the whole thrust of Government policy has been exactly in the opposite direction.
My hon. Friend mentioned the Macdonald review, but I think that it delivered some sound suggestions about how we could reduce the impact of red tape on the farming community. We are making good progress on implementing them. I am afraid that farmers do not always recognise when that has been done, because when they no longer have to fill in a form that they used to have to fill in, they do not notice. We may need to make people better aware of the fact that we are proceeding with that as fast as we can. Sometimes it will need changes in legislation, and that will take a little longer, but wherever we can, we are trying to implement the Macdonald review. I have regular meetings with Richard Macdonald to ensure that we keep up with his timetable.