AS ONE Defra agency appears to be finally learning the painful lessons of IT rollouts gone wrong, another seems to have walked into the same trap.
Defra and the Rural Payments Agency infamously pressed the ‘go’ button on the agency’s creaking IT system in February 2006 hoping to launch thousands of SPS 2005 payments before the system was ready or had even been properly tested. The rest is history – as ex-Defra Permanent Secretary Dame Helen Ghosh put it so eloquently, the payments simply ‘gummed up’ the system which could not cope.
RPA has been dealing with the fallout ever since and now, six years on, appears to be reaching something approaching stability.
SPS 2011 payments, although there are still problems, are flowing more easily than ever before and communications – a massive failure in the early crisis-ridden days of SPS – are improving both internally and to farmers (or ‘customers’ as RPA still insists on calling them).
There is, unlike before, now ‘a plan’, as RPA boss Mark Grimshaw likes to say. The agency’s efforts to address its deep-rooted problems and to prepare properly for the massive challenge of CAP reform will be laid out in its soon-to-be-published five-year plan.
One lesson clearly learned is that never again will a system be launched without having been fully tested and shown to work.
Meanwhile, AHVLA is having its own problems with an IT roll out that has effectively ‘gummed up’.
The £12m project is, on one level, small fry compared with the scale of the RPA fiasco or other Government IT flops like the £12bn NHS waste of taxpayer money.
But it is having an impact on the control of bTB, from bureaucratic frustration at farm and vet level to delays in collection of reactors and the collation of data, at a time when the fight against the disease is being ratcheted up a level.
It raises a number of questions.
Why were the problems now being experienced with ‘Release 6’not picked up before it was rolled out? When will they be fixed? And at what cost?
Have Defra/AHVLA been as transparent with vets and farmers as they could have been?
All of this will no doubt be answered in the independent review commissioned into the problem by AHVLA. Farmers and vets will await the outcome with interest.
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