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Rural Payments Agency

My Lords, I declare a serious interest in that I am married to a farmer. However, I have talked to many other farmers so I shall not be putting only my wife’s points. First, when will the interest on the late payments be paid? Secondly, when will the Government get around to paying out the €150 rebate on the first €5,000 that is supposed to have been repaid? Thirdly, I thought the whole point of this system is that it goes back to reality and therefore we are trying to get accurate maps from which to work. It seems unbelievable that when there is a tiny transcription error on the cheques and you write in say, ““Terribly sorry but, as you can see, two of those figures are clearly the wrong way round””, they write back and say, ““We spotted it first and therefore we are going to maintain this error””. It seems quite dotty that they do not just get it right and agree what the real figure is. It will lead to further problems because the errors will have to be corrected at some stage. Presumably, next year it will all come down to when these checks are taking place on the ground. I heard that inspectors go round with GPS systems checking the areas. Civilian GPS systems are accurate to around 2 metres to 3 metres only. The countryside boundaries drawn by the Ordnance Survey maps are accurate to only 1 metre, so there is a built-in error. You are expecting mapping to an accuracy of 0.1 of a hectare which is only 1 metre out in a 100-metre long boundary, and many fields are much longer than that. You cannot map to such accuracy so there will be horrendous rows in the future. I suggest that everyone gets a bit more sensible about it. I know a farmer with organophosphate poisoning who, being very ill, goes in and out of hospital but tries to maintain the paperwork. There is a serious problem in trying to get the right boxes ticked. The unreasonable attitude of the RPA towards small slippages here and there—given that the illness is caused originally by farming—is quite unfair and it ought to take more interest. I hope that the data transfer system from the RPA to the RDS system in Defra is working and is no longer losing parcels of land when it transfers the data so that you cannot get your entry-level schemes correct. When will the entry-level payments start? When I find that there are errors of £3 and £10,000, I have no confidence in calculating the exchange rate. There should be no error. If that error is consistent across the whole £1.5 billion figure, someone is filching £450,000.