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Rural Payments Agency

My Lords, the noble Lord is absolutely right. I refer him back to the exact sentence in the Statement: "““I have therefore agreed with the RPA that where full payments are not possible in the early part of next year, partial payments should start in mid-February for eligible claims above 1,000 euro””." There is an implication in that sentence that some farmers, as I said, will get a full payment because they will have gone through the second stage of validation by that time. What we cannot do is get enough through in order to promise full payments. It is not their fault that the second stage of validation will not be ready for everyone—otherwise, quite clearly, the chief executive would not have advised us that he could not complete full payments by the payment window—and no one is blaming the farmers for this. The forms are horrendous but they will get easier as the years go by. Some farmers will receive a full payment, I think that is the implication of the Statement, because they will have gone through the second stage of validation, but the majority will not have and, because of this, we will introduce a partial payment system. The figure is set at 50 per cent because that protects us under the European Union rules for doing this without validating the claim. We have no authority to pay more than 50 per cent if we have not validated the claim. This year, the first year, was slightly different and there was a dispensation of up to 80 per cent for non-validated claims, but that is not available for the second year.