The UK’s government department for farming and the environment is offering up to £27 million to keep its controversial legacy farm payments systems running for another three years as it develops a replacement.
The Rural Payments Agency (RPA) – an executive agency sponsored by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) – pays more than £2 billion annually to support more than 90,000 farmers.
The RPA and its IT systems have been the source of a great deal of criticism going back decades, but in a tender notice published last month, Defra said it would need to support them for another three years.
“As part of Defra’s digital strategy this application will be replaced with a new solution/service as part of the Farming Countryside Programme (FCP) that is also delivering major policy changes over the next few years,” the tender notice said.
The current payments policy and rules engine application was previously known as SITI Agri but is now known as ABACO Agri.
“To provide sufficient time to implement, transition and migrate to a new solution/service, the Authority requires a contract for the support, maintenance and development of schemes/grants on Defra’s existing deployment of ABACO Agri for up to three years,” the notice added.
The contract is set to start in February next year. Defra has given itself six months to find a supplier, even though it was warned of risks associated with the contract four years ago.
Last month, the National Audit Office (NAO) spending watchdog said the contract had been renewed several times and is due to expire in January 2025 and cannot be extended further.
“The contract provides maintenance, support and ongoing development of the rural payments service… but is becoming increasingly out-of-date. The need to address the issue of the contract expiry was first flagged in January 2020, but work has only been under way to explore possible options since 2022. In June 2023, the Programme commissioned a 12-week ‘discovery’ exercise to look at options, but this work took longer than anticipated and did not report until January 2024,” the NAO said.
The spending watchdog noted there had been “limited progress so far in developing a unified service to replace the legacy systems.”
Defra’s analysis suggests the new system won’t be fully ready until early 2028. “This has left Defra in a high-risk situation. It is a major risk to delivery, Defra’s reputation and the achievement of scheme outcomes,” the NAO said.
If it did not find a supplier to support the legacy systems, the current supplier is set to provide “termination assistance” for 18 months from the end of the contract.
The NAO is silent on who the current supplier is. However, spending documents for spring 2022 suggest it is Keep IT Simple (KITS), which won a £3.9 million contract extension for “Rural Payments Managed Platform Support and Maintenance Contract.”
In February 2021, Panoply Holdings plc bought KITS for £31.7 million from Grant Harris, who, according to his LinkedIn profile, is a former RPA enterprise architect.
Numerous reports have slammed the RPA’s performance. In 2016, Parliament’s spending watchdog, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), found that “payments to farmers have been delayed at a time when their cash flow is already stretched.”
Since 2012, Defra led the Common Agricultural Policy Delivery Programme, together with its delivery bodies, the RPA and the Government Digital Service, to develop a single IT solution for new EU regulations that came into force in 2014, two years before the UK opted to leave the trading and political bloc.
The PAC said a January 2013 review by the Cabinet Office found costs would increase from £155 million to £215 million, a 40 percent hike.
The three key bodies involved in the Common Agricultural Policy Delivery Programme – Defra, the Rural Payments Agency, and the Government Digital Service – were unable to work together effectively, the PAC found.
The Register has asked Defra for comment. ®