Topical question asked in the House of Commons, by Michael Jack (Conservative). It was answered on Thursday, 29 October 2009 on behalf of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

Topical Questions

Question: Pursuant to the Secretary of State's opening comments, the National Audit Office has issued a second damning report into the Rural Payments Agency, which it said had scant regard for protecting public money and had too high a cost base. When will someone at ministerial and senior official level take responsibility for this shambolic organisation, get to grips with it and publish a report about what its future holds?

Answer: I take responsibility; that is my job. As the right hon. Gentleman will know, the history of the RPA is not a happy one. Since I took up this position, the one thing I have made clear to the Department and to the RPA is that the agency must maintain the improvement it has achieved—we should acknowledge that—in getting payments to farmers more speedily, given the unhappy past. I am not prepared to do anything that gets in the way of doing that, because what farmers want is to get the payments as quickly as possible. There have been previous occasions on which the House has invited me to do things in relation to the RPA, but I am not prepared to put in jeopardy that progress from what was a mess.

Secondary information