Foreword
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I am laying this report before Parliament, under section 10(3) of the Parliamentary Commissioner Act 1967, as I have found injustice in consequence of maladministration and the Government does not propose to remedy all of the injustice.
I want to bring to Parliament’s attention this rare occurrence of a refusal to accept all of my recommendations in full, particularly as my investigation concerns the administration of the Single Payment Scheme in England. This Scheme has previously been of interest to Parliament and the subject of scrutiny by the House of Commons Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee and the House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts. So problems with the administration of the Scheme have been in the public domain for some time. What this report adds now are my findings of what happened to individuals who, with the support of Members of Parliament, brought their complaints to the Parliamentary Ombudsman in pursuit of a remedy for the injustice they sustained. A pursuit which, despite having their complaints upheld, has won the individuals cold comfort from the Government.
This report sets out the results of my investigation of two representative complaints about the administration of the 2005 Single Payment Scheme by the Rural Payments Agency (RPA), part of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). These two complaints are representative of twenty-two other complaints made to my Office about the 2005 Single Payment Scheme in England.
In 2005 the Single Payment Scheme based on land area replaced the previous production-based system of farm subsidy within the European Union. Farmers in England receive about £1.6 billion a year in subsidies from the Single Payment Scheme. For many farmers, the money is essential. By any measure, the good administration of the Scheme is in the public interest. My investigation found that there was injustice as a consequence of maladministration in the administration of the Scheme. Few people will be surprised by this, including those in Parliament and the two Select Committees who have scrutinised the Scheme.
In October 2006 the National Audit Office (NAO) reported on problems experienced by RPA in administering the 2005 Scheme, with update reports in December 2007 and October 2009. The NAO’s first report included research that revealed, among other things, that delayed payments had been a source of increased stress for 20% of the farmers surveyed. The House of Commons Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee looked in detail at the same subject in 2006 and 2007. RPA’s Chief Executive acknowledged in the Agency’s annual report for 2008-09: ‘…our greatest challenge remains the accurate and timely payment of the Single Payment Scheme to some 106,000 customers’.
My report shows that RPA was unable to keep to 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 to its payment timetable, when it knew, or should have known, that the timetable was increasingly unrealistic. In the language of the Ombudsman’s Principles[1], RPA failed to get it right, to be customer focused, or to be open and accountable. As my report details, these failures of the 2005 Single Payment Scheme took a direct personal and financial toll on the two farmers[2] whose complaints I have investigated.
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, as my report explains.
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. A public body should not be able to avoid putting things right simply by asserting that it has met the minimum standards required by law; or that statements by Ministers do not create reasonable expectations. I am also concerned by Defra’s argument that responding to demands for compensation for injustice resulting from its maladministration ‘would divert both staff time and financial resources, when both are at a premium, from the job that most farmers want us to get on and do’. As I say in my report, it is not a recognisable, or defensible, principle of good administration that an appropriate remedy for a justified complaint should not be forthcoming on the grounds of the administrative convenience of the body whose maladministration caused that injustice.
I recognise that the provision of remedies can be time consuming and involve the diversion of public resources but the best way to avoid these opportunity costs is, of course, to ensure that maladministration does not cause injustice to the users of public services in the first place.
In any event, as I say in my Principles for Remedy, whilst I understand that there is often a balance between responding appropriately to people’s complaints and acting proportionately within available resources, finite resources should not be used as an excuse for failing to provide a fair remedy.
Nor do I consider that it would be appropriate to refuse to remedy such injustice in one case because other people might also have suffered similar injustice and might make a similar complaint seeking equivalent redress. Defra has suggested that my report will ‘inevitably generate a new demand for financial compensation for alleged actual financial loss’. I think it unlikely that providing a fair remedy to the 24 individuals referred to in my report will result in a flood of complaints from others that require similar remedy. That is not to say that I think it impossible that there are others who suffered some level of injustice as result of the maladministration I report on now. Rather, I have no evidence that, in addition to the 24 individuals referred to in my report, there are people who experienced such substantive injustice at the time of the failures in the administration of 2005 Single Payment Scheme that they considered it necessary to ask Members to refer their complaints to the Ombudsman.
Finally, 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.
I therefore ask Parliament to consider the personal stories told in this report, the approach to remedy that I have recommended and Defra’s response to my recommendations.
Ann Abraham
Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman
December 2009
[1.] The Ombudsman’s Principles was most recently published in February 2009 and is available at www.ombudsman.org.uk
[2.] The names of the complainants are not used in this report to protect their anonymity.
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