KEETCH ON REPORT ON RURAL PAYMENT AGENCY MALADMINISTRATION

3.01.52pm GMT Fri 15th Jan 2010

Paul Keetch, MP for Hereford reports that the Parliamentary Ombudsman, Ann Abraham, called on the Rural Payments Agency (RPA) to apologise and pay compensation for the maladministration of the Single Payments Scheme in a report laid before Parliament in December 2009, entitled: Cold Comfort: the Administration of the 2005 Single Payment Scheme by the Rural Payments Agency.

Problems with the 2005 Single Payment Scheme have been in the public domain for some time. What the Ombudsman's report adds now are her findings of what happened to individuals who sustained an injustice due to RPA's mistakes.

The report sets out the results of the Ombudsman's investigation of two representative complaints about the administration of the 2005 Single Payment Scheme by the Rural Payments Agency, part of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). These two complaints are representative of twenty two other complaints made about the 2005 Single Payment Scheme in England.

In the report Ms Abraham said:

'These failures of the 2005 Single Payment Scheme took a direct personal and financial toll on the two farmers whose complaints I have investigated.

My report shows that the RPA was unable to keep its timetable for handling the digital mapping of land or for making payments to farmers. But RPA continued to tell farmers that it would keep its payment timetable, when it knew, or should have known, that the timetable was increasingly unrealistic. In the language of the Ombudsman's Principles RPA failed to get it right, to be customer focused, or to be open and accountable....'

The reader of this report will see that the remedies I have recommended are modest, particularly set against the overall cost of the Single Payment Scheme. But my recommendations go beyond what Defra believes is appropriate.

Important principles are at stake here. My view is that an appropriate remedy should be forthcoming where injustice has been suffered as a consequence of maladministration by a public body.

...it also saddens me that a public body refuses to provide relatively modest financial remedy for substantive injustice to people whose complaints have been referred to the Ombudsman by Members of Parliament and which the Ombudsman has upheld following an independent investigation.'

Commenting, the MP said, "I am disappointed that Defra have not accepted the Ombudsman's recommendations in full. Many of my constituents were affected by the mistakes made by the RPA in 2005 and I am pleased to be able to report back to them on the Ombudsman's findings."