Mr. Paul Savage:

I will take the Deputy's points in order. There was the point about waiting to get scores, getting the interim payment and the Department having to claw some back, and all of the issues associated with rolling the scheme out. From the Department's point of view, that did not happen in the sequence and way we would have liked. In a way, that is reflective of how schemes are launched. The traditional cycle sees us go through a CAP reform - I will come back to the issue of changing the cycle in future - every five or seven years. Then we go through a process of designing schemes and implementing them. When we get to the point where the plan is approved and we want to start rolling out the schemes, there is a demand to get the schemes out straight away, have things up and running and have farmers continue receiving their payments, as would have been the case when moving from GLAS to ACRES. Unfortunately, that puts the Department in a situation where, while we are rolling the scheme out, we are actually putting the IT systems and administrative structures in place at the same time. That is the difficulty we have had.

We talked about the problems in GLAS ten years ago. There were similar issues in terms of the rolling out of the scheme because of the sequencing as well as the parallel activities going on when a new programme is put in place. ACRES has been similar and we have had problems. It is not the same scheme, though. ACRES is a big step up from what was going on in GLAS. People are farming the same land and the same core of people are involved, but the requirements under this scheme are very different. There are new elements to the ACRES scheme and new demands. There is a new results-based element, which has a very large number of participants. ACRES has been a much more complex scheme from the Department's point of view to administer and for farmers to get their heads around and participate in.

We acknowledge that. Due to that complexity, the fact that we were rolling out the scheme, and the effort that was going into developing the systems while we were rolling it out, those elements did not fall into place in the manner we would have liked. When the Deputy talks about rolling over, continuing on and trying to keep it fairly consistent, from our perspective-----