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Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

One of the most useful initiatives taken when my noble Friend took over as Minister with responsibility for farmers has been his surgeries. Many hon. Members have used them; they are an effective innovation, on which we congratulate him. Some problems continue: the RPA is still working with poor-quality data, there are genuine quality control problems at the processing end, and there is a lack of technical knowledge in the RPA of how the SPS works. The Government must ensure that the RPA is adequately resourced. We have experienced doing things down to a price, not up to a standard. My hon. Friend the Member for Brecon and Radnorshire (Mr. Williams)—as I shall continue to call him—knows that one of the early impressions that we gained from what we saw at Reading was that the place was full of contractors and outsourced staff, who were low-paid and poorly trained. The people who knew about the processes were demoralised by the large-scale redundancies that they had to endure. Even though the RPA would cost even more in the short term, money spent on that would be money well spent in the medium and long term. Of course, 20,000 or so 2005 claims need reviewing as soon as possible. My heart sank when I realised the RPA was to carry out an across-the-board update of its rural land register. Given all the problems that it experienced in the early months of mapping, and the appalling delivery of RLR maps in 2004, I am not certain that all that will not be repeated if the SPS system does not reach a stable state. The remapping must be done with great caution, but I advise, from a technical point of view, that it should be delayed into the medium term, until the SPS system, which it underpins, is significantly more stable. I hope that everything will be done in the short term for the 2007 scheme payments. Lord Rooker said that the objective was to pay 75 per cent. by the end of March 2008. We should go further and faster. I believe—and the NFU agrees—that we should pay at least 80 per cent. of the claims by the end of the year. That is a reasonable target. The system is becoming more effective and the staff are becoming more familiar with it. Let us not allow change to disrupt that. We should accelerate the payments so that the 120,000 farmers and their families throughout the country do not have to endure again what happened from early 2006 to mid 2007.