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)
“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)