EU Referendum


Booker: Cyclone Pam and other matters


22/03/2015



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Booker leads this week with a story on Cyclone Pam. The other stories have been posted separately.

The "three" is the one to savour as, yet again, we see CAP reform descend into chaos when it is handed to British civil servants to execute it. We saw this in 1993 with the introduction of the IACS system, under the chaotic custodianship of then Agriculture minister John Gummer.

This time, though, we have Angela Eagle, Labour's front bench rural affairs spokeswoman, ranting away at the Government over the £154 million IT fiasco that has yet again made an utter shambles of how EU subsidies are paid to our farmers.

Designed by the Rural Payments Agency (RPA) to enable these transactions to be conducted only online, the scheme collapsed in such chaos that the RPA has returned to the paper-based system it was intended to replace.

Farmers are now having to download forms, fill them in by hand and send them by post to the RPA office, complete with supporting documents, including scale maps of the areas farmed. These data will then be entered manually onto the completer database, with the process taking so long that the deadline has had to be extended a month to 15 June.

Ms Eagle may well castigate the RPA for its failures, but she has a short memory, clearly choosing to forget the chaos that in 2007 engulfed the previous £350 million payments scheme, personally chosen by Labour’s Margaret Beckett, which led to Britain having to hand over £590 million in fines to Brussels.

In 2011, the man who had presided over this fiasco as head of the RPA, Tony Cooper, was paid £311,000 to take early retirement (plus a pension pot of £1.3 million). Another £47 million was given to other RPA officials to retire likewise.

Altogether this was a perfect vignette of how we are now governed. And all our politicians can do is scream abuse at the other side until it is time for them to take the reins – and preside over the next shambles.