§ Mr. EvansTo ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs if she will make a statement on the fine imposed by the European Commission on her Department for administrative errors. [100961]
§ Mr. MorleyBy decision 2003/102/EC of 14 February 2003 the European Commission excluded 14.84m of UK expenditure from reimbursement by the European Community, on the grounds that it was not effected in accordance with Community rules. Of this, 14m was due to shortcomings in the operation of the beef subsidy schemes, 492,000 to shortcomings in checks on carcases accepted into public storage and 55,000 to failures to comply with payment deadlines. These sums relate mainly, but not entirely, to CAP schemes administered by the Rural Payments Agency, which is an executive agency of Defra.
The livestock penalties largely relate to a lack of cross checks between bovine subsidy claims and the computerised cattle registration database in the marketing year 2000–01, coupled with an incomplete programme of on-farm inspections. The FMD outbreak was a factor in both cases. Automatic cross checks between the computerised cattle database and bovine subsidy claims have now been established.
The shortcomings in public storage relate to the acceptance for intervention storage of certain incorrectly classified carcases by Livestock and Meat Commission (LMC) inspectors in Northern Ireland in 1998. It has since been arranged that LMC inspectors liaise more closely with the Department of Agriculture and Rural Development Northern Ireland (DARDNI) inspectors. Unannounced on-the-spot controls by RPA technical inspectors have also been introduced, in agreement with DARDNI.
The remaining penalties relate to the failure to make within the regulatory deadlines some payments for maize during the marketing year 2000–01 and some payments for set-aside during the marketing year 134W 1999–00. In England, instructions to staff have been reviewed and reinforced to stress the payment deadlines and the need for timely processing. In the current EAGGF year almost 99 per cent. of main AAPS payments were made to producers in England by the payment deadline date of 31 January 2003.
The UK Government regrets that any of its expenditure should be subject to disallowance. However, in the most recent report of the European Court of Auditors, relating to the calendar year 2001, the UK was the only member state to receive a net credit from disallowance decisions. Furthermore, this decision represents only about half of one percent of agricultural expenditure in the UK funded by the Community each year.