The Rural Payments Agency's Single Payment Scheme uses
a£350m ITsystem to pay farmers the
right amount in EU subsidies. But the National Audit Office (NAO)
said in a report it published on 16 October that the agency's
systems are "very expensive", "cumbersome", difficult to change to
keep up-to-date with new policies, and are in danger of becoming
obsolete.
But the system is only four years old.
Accenture has
100 contractors working full-time on the system. Each one cost
taxpayers £200,000 in 2008/09. The Single Payment Scheme costs
about £1,700 per claim, which is six times the cost in Scotland of
paying subsidies to farmers.
IT consultant Ben Toth,
who runs a small farm and has come into contact with the Rural
Payments Agency's Single Payment Scheme, says, "It has got to be
one of the most ridiculous IT projects ever.
"The average farm receives a payment of £2,567 per annum from
Defra [Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, which
includes the Rural Payments Agency]. We receive less than £1,000.
How can Accenture feel they have done a good job when it costs more
than £1,600 to process each payment? It would have been better to
employ 400 new graduates with Excel spreadsheets."
The NAO has published three reports on the problems of the
Single Payment Scheme and its IT. The
latest NAO report is the most negative. It said that Defra and
the Rural Payments Agency had a "scant regard for the proper
management of public funds".
Unusually, the NAO
was published without Defra's agreement of the factual content of
the report.
Normally, as part of a "clearance process", departments sign off
NAO reports to show they agree with the facts and figures.
But this time Defra refused to sign off the NAO report - and the
NAO published it anyway. It is thought this is the first time in
more than 20 years that the NAO has published a report without any
sign off.
The episode shows how hard it is to get to the truth after a
major government IT failure.
There was also conflicting information given by civil servants
to Defra.
The NAO found that, since October 2008, Defra published
internally a performance report which contained a formal 'traffic
light' assessment of progress against ministerial targets,
including targets for the Rural Payments Agency.
In the six months up to March 2009, 13 out of 15 assessments
were "green", the other two being "amber". This suggested that
Defra was impressed with the agency's performance.
But the NAO did not agree with all of the good reviews of
performance.
The NAO also discovered that while ministers were being given a
wealth of green lights over the agency's performance, they may not
have been given a copy of the agency's internal risk register,
which put seven out of the top 10 risks at red and the other three
at amber.
When Computer Weekly asked Philip Gibby, a director at the
National Audit Office, whether ministers were misled into believing
all was well with a £350m IT project at the Rural Payments Agency,
he gave no immediate answer.
"I don't want to use the word 'misled' but there has been
over-optimistic reporting," he replied.
He added, "[The Rural Payments Agency] has been over-optimistic
in the information it has been giving the department and there is
not enough scrutiny and challenge of the information the department
has been receiving."
The odd thing about Gibby's complaint of over-optimism is that
officials at Defra had conceded to MPs three years ago that they
had been over-optimistic over their plans and reporting on the IT
system from Accenture to pay subsidies of £1.6bn to about 116,000
farmers.
Indeed, excessive and unwarranted optimism has dogged many
government IT projects, including the £12.7bn National Programme
for IT in the NHS; the Home Office's £234m C-Nomis IT scheme, on
which costs more than doubled; and the Libra system for magistrates
courts, in which costs rose from about £180m to £444m.
Clearly, over-optimism was a factor in the downfall of the
Single Payment Scheme. But it is not the cause; and although the
NAO has identified what has gone wrong at the Rural Payments
Agency, it has not said why.
This is because the NAO is barred from discussing political
policy - although it is the incomprehensible complexity of the
government's policy that is a likely cause of the implementation
failure.
On 26 October 2009 the Public Accounts Committee will meet to
question civil servants at Defra and the Rural Payments Agency over
the Single Payment Scheme. With so many facts in contention, it
could be an acrimonious session.
But still it won't decide the cause of the failure - because the
Public Accounts Committee, like the NAO, is not allowed to discuss
political policy.
So will the full facts about the Single Payment Scheme ever
emerge? In government IT disasters they never do.
Posterity nevertheless has the benefit of the comments of
Richard
Bacon, an MP on the Public Accounts Committee:
"The problem was clear: the government chose to introduce the
most hideously complicated of all the possible payment schemes, in
the shortest of all the possible timescales, while sacking its most
skilled and experienced staff and replacing them with temporary
agency workers in order to achieve 'efficiency' savings."
These won't be the official findings of the Public Accounts
Committee, but they are the closest anyone is going to get to the
truth.
NAO hits brick wall over Defra's Agency's IT failure - IT Projects
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