Public Accounts

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. The Assets Recovery Agency has recovered only £23 million against expenditure of £65 million. Most of us are at a loss to explain how £65 million can be spent to recover only £23 million by an agency that has the law on its side. The only thing to do with the people who were responsible for the agency—I think that they have now moved on—is plant them in the institutions of this country's enemies to find out whether they can destroy the economic and financial viability of those countries as well as they have managed the Assets Recovery Agency. I turn to the delays in administering the 2005 single farm payment scheme in England, which is a good example of my earlier point about the unnecessary restrictions in the motion. On the Rural Payments Agency and the single farm payment scheme, the permanent secretary to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Helen Ghosh, told our Committee:"““Ministers were being told it was possible when it was not in fact possible””." I am glad to have got that on the record, Mr. Deputy Speaker, but it was out of order for me to do so, because that was said in a hearing that we had with the permanent under-secretary to the same Department on the same subject this January, and the report has not yet been published and is not part of report HC 893, which comes within the motion. I hope that that makes my point for me.