---

Rural Payments Agency

My Lords, I repeat that part payments have not been ruled out altogether; we are awaiting further advice from the chief executive. As I pointed out, part payments involve problems of their own: they affect IT systems and the ability to make 2006 payments. On IT failure, we believe that the real issue is leadership of a complex organisation, not IT issues. All the main IT systems for the single payment scheme are in place and have produced the entitlement statements and first payments as planned. However, we know also that it has not been possible to ramp up the validation and distribution of payments as planned. The key objective of the new chief executive is to identify the problems and to develop and drive forward plans to overcome them.