Sir Ben Gill defends his position on SPS fiasco

A report last week by the National Audit Office (NAO) heavily criticised the way Defra and the Rural Payments Agency (RPA) have administered the scheme. It said £680 million had been wasted as a result of errors in implementing the scheme, which still costs £1,743 per claim in England, compared with just £285 in Scotland.

But the report has again focused attention on the decision by former Defra Secretary Margaret Beckett to opt for the ‘dynamic hybrid’ paymentsystem in England, described by the NAO as ‘the most complex model available’.

NFU president, Peter Kendall, last week blamed the crisis on ‘Defra rushing to implement a hugely complex model on purely ideological grounds with no regard for the consequences’, despite warnings about the risk.

Giving his reaction to the NAO report, Tenant Farmers Association chief executive George Dunn agreed the blame lay firmly with Mrs Beckett’s choice of payment system.

“The RPA has been a whipping boy for a very bad policy decision by Defra,” he said.

Assisted

But he added Mrs Beckett was ‘assisted’ in her decision by then NFU president Ben Gill, who Mr Dunn said ‘agreed the dynamic hybrid mechanism behind closed doors’ in February 2004.

Mr Dunn suggested he was ‘encouraging the Government to go down that route’ without the support of his organisation. “This was a Ben Gill issue, not an NFU one,” he said.

Sir Ben claimed the allegation demonstrated a ‘fundamental misunderstanding’ of the situation at the time. He said, in one of his last acts as NFU president, his intervention saved the industry from a far worse fate.

He said pressure from ‘certain quarters’, including the Country Land and Business

Association and the horticulture sector, had persuaded Defra to favour an area-based approach in England.

The historic approach adopted in Wales and Scotland was not an option. A purely area-based system would have been ‘enormously damaging’, particularly for the livestock sector, as many farmers would have experienced huge drops in payments, he said.

By persuading Mrs Beckett to opt instead for a gradual transition to area payments, Sir Ben said he ‘mitigated the damage for the first four years of the scheme’.

“We were faced with a mitigation exercise and Mr Dunn would do well to understand the complexity of what was being dealt with at the time rather than making selective headline statements,” said Sir Ben.

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