Naked civil servants knacker the Notting Hill canal - 30/11/06

How could a bunch of tossers in the Newcastle office of an obscure government agency, who apparently enjoy leaping naked from filing cabinets, have an impact on life in Notting Hill?

One of my favourite things in Notting Hill is the Grand Union Canal. It's a fantastic wild life haven, a joy for walkers, runners and cyclists and a great place to take the kids to feed the birds. But now a bureaucratic fiasco by something called the Rural Payments Agency is threatening all of that.

The RPA’s only job is to pay EU subsidies to British farmers, about £1.6 billion each year under a new system introduced at the start of 2006. You may well have views about handing out large wads to farmers, but put that to one side for now.

The fact is, the agency has completely failed to get the money out with non-payment, partial payment and over-payment being the order of the day. And that’s using a computer system that rose in price from £18 million to £37 million. Every other EU country has managed to hand the dosh over to their farmers without problems.

This failure means that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, DEFRA, now has to pay a fine of at least £63.5 million to the EU. So far, so good in the topsy-turvy world of British and Euro bureaucrats.

But DEFRA has had to find the money to pay the fine from somewhere, so it has decided to cut funds to the British Waterways Board, which, amongst other things, runs our canal system. And it, the Waterways Board not DEFRA, has made a very good job of it.

Canals throughout the country have enjoyed a renaissance in the last decade, reversing a decline going back to the mid-19th century when railways superseded them. The Grand Union Canal running through Notting Hill has benefited greatly from this so that now it’s an almost bucolic place to take a stroll rather than the fairly scary wasteland it used to be.

But these cuts of £7 million per year, which have already resulted in 180 job losses, now mean that we may well see the canal reverting to its previous state. Funnily enough, £7 million is the amount that has been paid in performance related bonuses to RPA staff in the past 18 months. What would they have been paid if they’d actually done their jobs?

Plus Johnston McNeill, the RPA boss sacked in March, is still being paid his £114,000 salary even although someone else has been doing his job for over six months. What, I wonder, has this McNeill fellow got on David Miliband, the gormless twat who is the minister in charge at DEFRA?

And the icing on the cake is the carry-on that apparently was the daily life of the civil servants up in Lancaster House in Newcastle; the ones who were supposed to be paying the money to the farmers.

In June it was reported that they had been hiding cups of vomit around the office to fester (‘cup-a-sick’); playing pranks involving faeces, female sanitary products and mucus; indulging in drug-taking and sex in the toilets; and jumping naked from filing cabinets. Four staff were eventually sacked and five disciplined.

Fair enough, it sounds like kind of a fun place to work. But I really think they should have got the bloody payments out to the farmers before they started shagging each other in the loos. Then I wouldn’t have to worry about one of my favourite Notting Hill places going down the pan.