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Rural Payments Agency

My Lords, I, too, am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord King of Bridgwater, for introducing this very timely debate. I declare my interest as a partner in a small family farm. While we have applied for payments under the single payment scheme—SPS—we are not, thank goodness, in any way dependent on them. I am deeply dismayed by the complacency displayed by the Minister and his right honourable friend Mrs Beckett to the circumstances of those farmers who are now in dire financial straits because of a series of management failures that were forecast several years ago. I have no doubt that other noble Lords will speak very movingly about the farmers’ plight. Why has this failure occurred? Why is it that nobody seems to have had the courage to tell Ministers that things are going disastrously wrong? As the noble Lord, Lord King, pointed out, even when Ministers were told by the EFRA Select Committee in another place, they insisted that the committee was wrong. Why is it that Ministers were so unaware of what was happening? Were they taking the glossy annual reports, with their glowing record of targets achieved, at their face value? Did they ever ask about targets that were not achieved? Why, when all the alarms were sounding from at least November 2005, and probably much earlier, did Ministers not heed them? Could it be that facing the facts became so repugnant that an ostrich-like mentality set in? It is not good enough to blame the previous administration, as the Minister did last Monday in his response to the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard of Northwold, when he said,"““it was the noble Baroness’s government who set up the introduction of arm’s-length delivery agencies””.—[Official Report, 27/3/06; col. 605.]" The blame falls fairly and squarely on the present Government and they must accept that responsibility. It was they who, as the noble Lord admitted, set up the RPA. It has been their policy that has driven the agency and it is they who appointed an apparently incompetent team to run it. I do not believe I am alone—from what the noble Lord, Lord King, has said, I know I am not—in finding distasteful the Minister’s response to the noble Baroness, Lady Byford, despite his kind words to her today. Last Monday, she suggested that the Minister might like to consider his own position, to which he said:"““we take our responsibilities extremely seriously and I think her remarks were a little cheap””.—[Official Report, 27/3/06; col. 604.]" If the RPA were a commercial business, there is no doubt that those responsible for this disaster, whether in the field or at arm’s length, would have resigned of their own volition or would have been sacked. The Minister’s right honourable friend Mrs Beckett said in another place last Monday:"““It has to some extent been asserted that the Government were warned from the beginning that the RPA could not handle the scheme. No, we were not: the RPA gave every assurance that it could indeed handle it. As for whether Ministers take responsibility, I am taking responsibility””—" the noble Lord, Lord King, has already said this—"““which is why I removed the chief executive””.—[Official Report, Commons, 27/3/06; col. 552.]" This is risible and indicates a total failure by the Secretary of State to question the organisation for which she claims responsibility. Surely the previous chief executive, Mr Johnston McNeill, must have known what the problems were. Surely the RPA senior management team must have known what was happening. What was the RPA’s audit committee, which is tasked with the duty to advise the chief executive,"““in respect of the RPA’s accounts, internal control systems and internal and external audit””," doing? As, according to his right honourable friend, the Minister has spent not just hours but days working on this over many, many months, why did he not know what was happening? I am finding it difficult to understand just what the current position is of the former chief executive, Mr Johnston McNeill. The Minister said on Monday that he had been removed from office and that, as far as the Minister knew, he was still in receipt of his salary. I note from the annual report for the year 2004–05, the latest published on the RPA website, that one individual was in receipt of an annual salary of between £225,000 and £230,000. Will the Minister please confirm that this is the salary of the chief executive, and will he please tell the House what that salary is today? Is the noble Lord able to confirm that interviews are currently being conducted for his replacement? If they are, how is it that no decision has been taken on Mr McNeill’s future duties, as the noble Lord told the House on Monday? What independent assessment is being made of the competence of the chief executive and other members of the Ownership Board and, if they are found to have misled Ministers as to the true state of affairs at the RPA, what are the sanctions? The noble Lord has said that the former or suspended—we do not know—chief executive is entitled to some rights. Will he tell the House what those rights are? How much are they going to cost the taxpayer? The next question is: how can we retrieve the situation? The noble Lord, Lord Grantchester, has made some very useful suggestions. Although many criticisms have been levelled at staff who must field the telephone calls of justifiably irate farmers, I have always found them to be courteous and as helpful as they can be in the circumstances. It is not their fault that they are inadequately trained and that they may not understand exactly what they are supposed to be doing. Most of them will probably have no experience of agricultural, let alone rural, life. It is my understanding that staff have been moved around according to the exigencies of the service and that a lot of temporary staff have had to be employed. This must mean that they are given little opportunity to be trained, let alone to settle into a task—another point made by the noble Lord, Lord Grantchester. They are the first point of contact for customers of the agency. Anyone who has ever had anything to do with a business that involves dealing directly with customers knows exactly how important it is to have informed and efficient front-line staff. It is also my understanding that the computer system is far too ambitious for the job that it was designed to carry out. It strikes me that too much has been expected of the whole organisation since its inception. I wonder whether noble Lords realise that the Rural Payments Agency operates 97 different CAP schemes in addition to the single payment scheme. It will almost take a miracle for the vision, details of which are to be found in the RPA strategy for 2004-09, to materialise. I believe that much of the problem lies with too much policy and not enough management and practicality. It may be laudable that the RPA wants, as it says in its strategy,"““To be a customer focused paying agency, respected as the European leader in efficient and effective administration and as an authoritative source of advice to policy makers””." What a dream. It seems unlikely that its current structure will allow that to happen. Instead of allowing the RPA to grow naturally, the policy makers seem to have asked it to take on more and more elements when an inadequate management could not say, ““Enough is enough””. They have failed to ensure that staff are trained and ready to take on the extra work and that they have the tools with which to do it. This seems to be a case where the economies of centralisation are outweighed by the inefficiencies created by the complexity of the tasks allocated to the organisation. Will the Minister say whether any lessons have been learnt from this experience? He said that a new chief executive or acting chief executive had been parachuted in—not his words, but that was the inference—and I wonder whether he considers the next person on the ladder of command to be a new person, when he has already proved his inadequacy on the board, and whether he is a suitable replacement.