Grim story of public excess

RPA a byword for Whitehall wasteEVERY time that new details of Whitehall spending are published, the extent of the task facing Agriculture Minister Jim Paice, in his reorganisation of the Rural Payments Agency, becomes clearer.

The latest revelations of taxpayers' money being spent on luxury hotels, expensive lunches and meaningless away-days should not make pleasant reading for any arm of government, but it is particularly embarrassing for the RPA given that this is an agency which is, in any case, clearly dysfunctional, with vast sums being spent to very little effect other than constant frustration and distress for English farmers.

Only last year, the National Audit Office accused the RPA of "showing scant regard for the protection of public money" and now it transpires that the RPA has been spending over 1,000-a-week on staff entertainment while making overtime payments of more than 16m in five years. Meanwhile, farmers have been left to endure inaccurate and late payments.

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It is only to be hoped that this horror story has now reached its denouement and that the RPA, under the new management team installed by Mr Paice, will finally be run as effectively as its Scottish counterpart has been. Yet the latest instalment still stands as a reminder of how difficult it will be for the Government to end the culture of public-sector excess that has developed over the past decade.

In spite of the many diligent and responsible workers in Whitehall, in almost every department senior management has appeared to encourage the spending of public money for the convenience of themselves and their staff rather than the taxpayer for whom they supposedly work.

Yet in doing so, they show not only contempt for the public, but also a complete lack of understanding of how the real world operates. As Malton farmer Paul Stephens noted in these pages last week, if farmers ran their businesses in the style of the RPA, they would have gone bust years ago.