A committee of MPs has criticised the quality of
advice given by the Office of Government Commerce during the single
farm payment fiasco.
By February last year, the government had missed the deadline to
allocate about £1.5bn in farm payments, partly because of a
struggling IT project.
A report by Parliament's
Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
Committee said, “The government does not seem to be learning
the lessons of previous failures. There is a need for greater
expertise within government in the delivery of such complex and
important projects. The debacle also calls into question the
quality of the advice from the Office of Government Commerce
(OGC) to the department and the Rural Payment Agency.”
The OGC was created to improve the government’s track record on
failed IT projects.
However, the committee said the OGC needed to “review its
procedures and warning assessment systems which allowed a project
to reach a rating of probability of success of only 40%, seemingly
without effective preventative action being taken.
“Given the high importance of successful implementation of the
SPS scheme to the reputation of the department and the RPA, let
alone to the claimants, we find it extraordinary that Defra seemed
prepared merely to aim to keep the probability of success above 50%
just eight months before payments were due to begin.”
According the MPs' report, the OGC ‘Readiness for service’
gateway review in February gave the programme an ‘amber’ rating and
congratulated the RPA on its “great achievement” in starting
payments during that month. The OGC study prepared in February
predicted that payments would be made by the end of March, and
congratulated the RPA for its “sterling efforts” towards this
“momentous achievement”, the report says.
The single payment system was contracted to
Accenture in 2003.