Dr. James Moran:

Dr. Dunford has said it all. It is critical that we have an administrative system that enables farmers and gives them the freedom to farm. The key thing that makes the system work is that we have to be very clear on the outcome and results we want to achieve. This is based on a scoring system. All anyone - from the administrator to the taxpayer paying for this to the farmers delivering it - will need to worry about then is delivering the results and whether a particular field has delivered the result and the products. If the farmers have delivered, they get the payments and rewards for it. We do not have to worry about going out and checking what month of the year it was done, how many cows were there or whether the land was grazed with elephants or horses or whatever. We do not have this level of administrative checks. We have to be able to check that we have delivered on the agreed outcome. This is the basis of the results-based programmes.

Levels of trust are key in this. The administration letting go of all of these checks and box-ticking exercises to focus on a result is quite difficult, as is trusting farmers to deliver. The first thing they wonder is what will happen if they do not deliver the results. Will they be liable to penalties, audits and inspections? If the result is not delivered, it is not paid for so there are no problems there. It is easy enough to state this in principle. The difficulty for the scientists is to capture all of this complexity about environmental quality in a simple outcome-based system that can be administered and delivered on a farm. We have shown over the past ten years that this can work.

We must have an adaptive and flexible system. We have some of the answers now. We cannot wait until we have all of the answers. We start with knowing what we need to deliver now. We have a scoring and payment system on this. We have an administrator to deliver it. We continuously monitor and adapt. We will have more challenges in future. We do not stay in a rigid system. If we find something is not working, we have to be able to change it within the system and move on.