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Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

I rise with some relief, having been contacted three or four hours ago by the Clerks of the Committee to be told that the Chairman of the Committee was stuck on the tarmac at the airport in Florence and might not be able to make the start of the debate. Had I delivered on my offer to open the debate if he could not, the House would not have been regaled with the forensic performance that we always appreciate from the right hon. Member for Fylde (Mr. Jack), or his entertaining tour d’horizon of some of the main participants in the Rural Payments Agency saga, in particular. Together with my hon. Friend—as I shall call him—the Member for Brecon and Radnorshire (Mr. Williams), I was involved relatively early in the process, in late 2005, when we both visited the Reading office of the RPA in our roles as rapporteurs, when we did some of the early fact-finding work on what appeared to be going wrong with the single farm payment system. I am happy to make one or two salient observations from my own experience, having spent, before coming into this place in May 1997, three decades in medium to large-scale public sector information and communications technology projects. I have always taken a keen interest in the problems that Governments—successive Governments, to be fair—have had in delivering on large-scale systems of that kind. At the start of his comments on the RPA, the Chairman of the Committee said that our report was shot through with concern and alarm that accountability had not been at work in the events that followed the problems with the single payment system. He said that only one person had been sacked for his role in this affair—Johnston McNeill, the chief executive of the RPA. However, given that the former Minister in the House of Lords was removed shortly after the saga started to bubble up, it could reasonably be inferred that there was a firm link between his sacking and the RPA system. It is odd that so few people paid the ultimate penalty. For example, the senior civil servant—the permanent secretary—escaped any blame, condemnation or criticism. Not only that, but while many people were being taken off on their career tumbrils to some far-off car park and summarily disposed of, he was slipping out of a side door and being promoted elsewhere in the Government bureaucracy. New terms could be created as a result of this process. When, in sport, people play a virtuoso sparkling role in any particular game, they are said to have ““played a blinder””. The civil service equivalent is to bound up the career ladder from disaster to disaster, hereinafter to be known as ““playing a Bender””. It is sad that that phrase could get into the English language in that way.