Ministers knew of farming system risks

The former head of the Rural Payments Agency has claimed that senior civil servants at the Department of Environment and Rural Affairs (Defra) were well aware of how risky the failed rural payments system was before it collapsed.

Johnston McNeil, suspended when the Single Payment Scheme failed to pay thousands of subsidies to farmers, told a private meeting of the Commons rural affairs committee that ministers knew of the risks. ‘We made it clear to ministers that this was high risk all the way through this programme,’ he said.

McNeil said that although he never told ministers their decision to move to a Single Payment System for farmers while implementing significant efficiency reforms in the agency was impossible, his agency’s view was it was high risk from the start, made riskier by policy changes that were up to a year late.

MPs in the committee repeatedly challenged his view of events, which contrasted with public ministerial optimism that payments would be made on time up to the point of failure.

Lack of testing has already been cited as a significant factor in the system’s failure (Computing, 18 October). McNeil said end-to-end testing of the system was not possible in advance because the whole process had changed.

Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrats’ Defra spokesman, has called on the government to hold an inquiry, if it challenged McNeil’s claim that he: ‘Gave strong advice to ministers that they should learn to walk before they tried to run, and should implement a simple system basing new farm payments on what had been paid out historically.’

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