Common Agricultural Policy Delivery Programme: Progress Review inquiry
Closed
What the inquiry looked at
“The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) Delivery Programme is a combined effort between the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the Rural Payments Agency, Government Digital Service and other bodies to develop new systems and processes to support the implementation of the CAP in England. It was established in 2012 to address failings in how it was previously delivered and to adapt to the increased complexity of the new CAP. The original vision and design of the Programme was narrow, focussing largely on procuring IT systems, and was set back by numerous changes in leadership. In March 2015, in response to serious failings of the system, the online application system was withdrawn and replaced by "paper-assisted digital" applications for the 2015 scheme. Despite these challenges, the Department is making progress to meeting its target of paying Basic Payment Scheme claims for the majority of farmers in December. This inquiry examines the significant challenges that remain to make sure this year's payments are accurate, to prepare for future years, to maximise Programme benefits and minimise disallowance penalties. Previous inquiry This inquiry follows on from the Public Accounts Committee inquiry into this issue in March 2016 . In our report earlier this year, we recommended that the Department should set out clear milestones, by the end of June 2016, for when it expects to pay farmers for future years and when it will return to previous performance levels. The Committee also recommended that for this and future programmes, the Department should establish a clear and enduring vision based on expected programme benefits, together with clear milestones and priorities that can remain in place regardless of changes in leadership. The Cabinet Office, through its GDS, should also comprehensively assess departments' capabilities to deliver any changes it imposes and ensure that it provides an appropriate level of support for those changes. The failure of the Department, the RPA and GDS to work together effectively resulted in serious detriment to the Programme and Members were keen that the Department should review its approach to tackling serious failures of management and put in place measures to stop this ever happening again. The Department needed, as a matter of urgency, to explain and justify what it considered to be an appropriate target level of financial penalties from the European Commission, how it would achieve it and how it would monitor progress towards it. It was also thought necessary that HM Treasury should set out the mechanisms in place from 2016–17 to demonstrate that they are providing the budgetary incentives needed for the Department to do as much as possible to reduce disallowance penalties.”
The committee's words, from the inquiry page on parliament.uk ↗.
What it found
The extent of the Rural Payments Agency’s (the RPA’s) failure to pay farmers in England on time and in full is now clear. The RPA paid only 38% of farmers under the Basic Payment Scheme on 1 December 2015 (the first day of the payment window) compared to over 90% in previous years. By the end of January this had risen to 76%, but at the end of March 2016 there were still 14,300 farmers (16%) who had not received any payment.
Over 10,000 farmers who had received a payment had not been paid in full. Two thirds of the additional payments made to these farmers were in excess of €1,000 and were first paid in September 2016, over nine months after the first payment could have been received. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (the Department)
has responsibility for rural affairs in England, but it has not assessed the impact of these failures on farmers and the rural community nor done enough to mitigate the impact on farmers’ livelihoods of late and partial payments. The Department has been very slow to properly address the risk of financial penalties, known as disallowance, imposed by the European Commission for not complying with the scheme’s rules which remain far too high and it has failed to learn lessons from other countries that have been more successful in avoiding these penalties. The Department’s record of failure when developing systems to support subsidy payments to farmers does not inspire confidence in its ability to cope with the challenges associated with Brexit that lie ahead.
What the government said
No government response is linked to this report.
How the inquiry ran
Each dot is a dated item listed on this page, from the inquiry's opening on 12 October 2016 to its close on 4 January 2018.
- Oral evidence 2 Nov 2016
- Report 10 Feb 2017
What it recommended
The committee's recommendations are not listed here yet. Read them in 40th Report - Progress on the Common Agricultural Policy Delivery Programme ↗ on parliament.uk.
Evidence
Oral evidence sessions 1
- 2 Nov 2016No witnesses recordedparliament.uk ↗