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Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

My hon. Friend is right. We cannot refer to the response in any detail, but I shall come to a criticism of the Government’s probable response in a moment. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs continues to reiterate that the responsibility for delivering the scheme and advising Ministers on the ability to meet the timetable rested solely with the chief executive. To me, that sounds like a post hoc rationalisation, and as such, it is absolutely unacceptable. One of our main concerns was that no lessons had been learnt—here I come to the point raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Mr. Drew). I think that we shall find out that in the Government’s response, they will say something like, ““Many of the lessons learnt have been fed into the Department’s wider review of its governance of delivery.”” There is precious little evidence that that is true, and I am dubious about it. Perhaps I am an old pessimist, but I can foresee, in similar circumstances, a repeat of the problems that we saw with the RPA and other major systems, and I think that this Department, and other Departments, will not learn from the lessons that can be learned. We had two serious concerns, which lay at the heart of the RPA saga. The Chairman of the Committee referred to one a moment or two ago.