Criticism
The House of Commons Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee published on 18 January 2006 a highly critical interim report into the agency's IT systems and activity.
On 15 March 2006 the Chief Executive Johnson McNeil was sacked when a deadline of 14 February for calculating Single Payment Scheme entitlements was missed.
The payments are overdue, and farmers complain they are being taxed on money they haven't received and incurring interest costs and emergency loan charges, at a time when ex-farm prices are low.
Further, on 12 June 2006 the RPA confirmed that an internal inquiry was under way into "outrageous behaviour" in the agency office in Newcastle.
Read more about this topic: Rural Payments Agency
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“...I wasn’t at all prepared for the avalanche of criticism that overwhelmed me. You would have thought I had murdered someone, and perhaps I had, but only to give her successor a chance to live. It was a very sad business indeed to be made to feel that my success depended solely, or at least in large part, on a head of hair.”
—Mary Pickford (1893–1979)
“To be just, that is to say, to justify its existence, criticism should be partial, passionate and political, that is to say, written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“I, with other Americans, have perhaps unduly resented the stream of criticism of American life ... more particularly have I resented the sneers at Main Street. For I have known that in the cottages that lay behind the street rested the strength of our national character.”
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)