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The government's implementation of Europe's single payment scheme (SPS) for farmers was a "catastrophe", a group of MPs has concluded.

Parliament's environment, food and rural affairs select committee said that officials, including former secretary of state Margaret Beckett, should be held to account for their failure to ensure that farmers received payments on time and on budget.

MPs warned that the government's mismanagement of the single payment scheme could end up costing the taxpayer and the agriculture industry up to £0.5 billion pounds.

In a report published today, the committee said that the handling of the policy represented a "serious and embarrassing failure" for the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and its executive agency, the Rural Payments Agency (RPA).

The reform of the common agricultural policy (CAP) was supposed to simplify the system by which farmers applied for European subsidies, by replacing 11 separate schemes with one single payment.

But MPs said that Defra chose a "complex and very high risk" payment method to implement the new scheme, despite repeated warnings from the RPA whose "task-based" approach to dealing with claims was also branded as "fundamentally unsuitable".

The committee said that responsibility for the ensuing debacle "stretches from the top of Defra", but stressed that former RPA chief executive Johnston McNeill had been the only top official who had been held accountable for the fiasco through the loss of his job.

Its report questioned why others "closely involved" in implementing the single payments scheme, including now foreign secretary Ms Beckett and Defra's former permanent secretary Sir Brian Bender, had been allowed to move on from their previous jobs "unscathed" in light of the department's failure to deliver one of its key responsibilities.

Committee chairman Rt Hon Michael Jack said: "This report is as much about failed policy implementation as it is about a lack of accountability."

"The reason that we are calling for people to consider their positions is because of Defra’s failure to carry out one of its principal core functions," he added.

The Defra-commissioned Hunter review into the future of the RPA last week recommended that the agency should remain part of the department because the single payment scheme still had "some way to go before full stabilisation is achieved".

Defra did not immediately issue a response to the report upon its publication.