Simon McGee
Political Editor
THE blame for the farm payments disaster shifted towards former Environment Secretary Margaret Beckett last night as the civil servant sacked over the furore gave his side of the story.
Johnston McNeill, who was dismi
ssed as chief executive of the Rural Payments Agency (RPA) last March when it became obvious that the Single Payment Scheme was in utter chaos, has until now taken the blame for the fiasco which landed English farmers with a £22m bill in bank charges as well as untold stress.
But his long-awaited testimony to the Commons Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee – given behind closed doors but published last night – has convinced many key MPs that he was framed as a scapegoat for Ministerial failures.
The chairman of the committee, senior backbencher Michael Jack, told the Yorkshire Post last night that he believed the recent portrayal of Mr McNeill by the Government had been a "fiction" and there was now a need to broaden the question of accountability of Ministers as well as officials.
During a two-hour grilling, Mr McNeill dismissed the claims by former Ministers that they had been oblivious up until the last minute that there was anything wrong with the farm payments scheme, having "made it clear to Ministers that this was high risk all the way".
In the months leading up to the target payment date of March 2006, reports were passed to Ministers, particularly the then Farming Minister Lord Bach, which "demonstrated that we were running into trouble", Mr McNeill insisted.
It also emerged that there was a much wider circle of officials and advisers from the RPA and the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) involved in the day-to-day decisions about the scheme, and much more significant Ministerial involvement in key decisions about how the scheme would operate than has been suggested by previous witnesses.
Mr McNeill said the main reason for the "gumming up" of the system was the ineffectiveness of new "task-based" computer systems chosen to deal with an extremely complex way – decided by Ministers – to calculate payments.
But he insisted he genuinely believed they would be able to meet their promised target dates.
"Only at the fifty-ninth minute of the eleventh hour did we discover we had a problem which did not make it doable," he said.
Of his former political master Margaret Beckett, now Foreign Secretary, he also revealed: "In my time at the RPA I met Margaret Beckett twice, and the second was when I was dismissed."
He told MPs he had not applied for the job in the first place but had been convinced by headhunters to do so, and he gave the fullest apology yet from anyone involved in the whole sorry saga.
Mr Jack, a former Tory agriculture Minister, told the Yorkshire Post: "So far, the fiction has been that the RPA was an executive agency and that because Mr McNeill didn't do what Ministers wanted him to do, he was to blame.
!But there was clearly an element of joint ownership between the RPA and Defra, and Ministers were clearly kept informed.
"The most important thing is to go back to the beginning of it, to the fact that this was a voyage into the unknown. Ministers and officials all believed that the task-based approach was the future. From that lay the downfall of the Single Payment Scheme system.
"Ministers made the decision on timescales, on the system to be used and they never gave instructions on prioritising important claims.
"He made it absolutely clear that he told Ministers this was high risk."
A Defra spokesman said they would look at any report into the issue and respond when they had considered it.
