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Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

That person will certainly understand about risk, but I am not so certain about management. The hon. Gentleman’s point worries me very considerably indeed. At the heart of this matter are the mechanisms that the Government put in place when they introduce complex IT projects. Indeed, when the hon. Gentleman was a member of the Select Committee he highlighted that very point about the need to look at issues in detail and have the right expertise to guide us forward. What was clear, however, was the flawed relationship between DEFRA and its IT provider, Accenture, which was taken on to make changes in the Rural Payments Agency. Then, however, there had to be a second and subsequent discussion about how the single payment scheme would be introduced. DEFRA decided that it would remove some of its staff in pursuit of its Gershon savings, only to find that it then had to recruit another 900 temporary people in the Rural Payments Agency to make the scheme work. The very people who had experience of dealing with farmers were removed as part of the change programme, only to be replaced by less than expert people. The Department had a rural information system—a computerised system that was supposed to cope with the mapping and to provide those running the single payment scheme with information—but it singularly failed. I could go on through the litany of failure. On the question of risks, it beggars belief that the Office of Government Commerce did not put the brakes on what was happening. Yes, it produced some reports and red traffic lights, but despite the mounting risks of failure that were pointed out to DEFRA, which had a finger in the pie and an interest in the running of the Rural Payments Agency, and despite a great deal of investigation—I do not know whether the Department was blinded by events or by ministerial assurance that it would all be all right on the night—the wheel fell off big time. When, at the beginning of 2006, Ministers were promising payments first in February and then in March, the Committee produced an interim report warning of what was happening and talking about the need for interim payments, but we were rubbished by Lord Bach. I remember him talking on the ““Today”” programme about the Select Committee being chaired by a ““very strong person, that Michael Jack—he’s a Conservative.”” I resented the fact that he tried to politicise my work as the Chair to highlight the failures and danger points and what was going to happen with the Rural Payments Agency. In fairness to Lord Bach, he retracted some of those remarks when he gave evidence before us. When the wheel fell off, however, DEFRA had not heeded the warnings, and we now know what happened to the rural economy. As for who was responsible and who should have accepted responsibility, the head that rolled was Mr. Johnston McNeill’s—it was the agency’s former chief executive who was fired. Sir Brian Bender, the former permanent secretary at the Department, whose name was on the documents about the Rural Payments Agency, the DEFRA change programme and the agreement on the path forward, and Mr. Andy Lebrecht, one of the most senior civil servants in the Department—he sat on the management boards of the Rural Payments Agency and, indeed, on DEFRA’s own boards and should have been the link—were the people who effectively signed off what happened. Rachel Lomax, who was supposed to be an expert, was brought into the Department to provide advice. Despite all that, there was still failure, but only one person has paid for it with their job. The then Secretary of State went on to become the Foreign Secretary—