UK farm ministry offers £27M to support legacy systems for another three years

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 …

[Anonymous Coward]

In a previous life I was involved in a rural payments scheme. DEFRA hated us as we always managed to pay farmers the right amount and on time whereas DEFRA were often a year (or more!) behind in their payments. Nice to see DEFRA haven't let their standards slip.

[Pascal Monett]

"another three years"

Not to worry. With UK Gov's history of IT projects, the "replacement" won't be ready before 2030.

And vastly overbudget, obviously . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "another three years"

Plus ‘termination extension’ at 10x price.

Surprised Motorola didn’t bid.

[TimMaher]

Re: Motorola

Crapita surely (Ed).

[Richard 12]

£100 per claimant per year

That seems rather high.

How big are the forms? Does it really take someone an entire day to read one landowner's forms?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: £100 per claimant per year

A long time ago - before 2012 - we bid for this project (and didn't win) - when it was still referred to as the Rural Payments Agency (maybe it still is ?) rather than DEFRA

There were around 180 different schemes that you could claim against at that time.

The corresponding "form" was nearly 30 pages together with about 100 pages of notes and explanations - and on top of that any supplementary details

So no, £100 does not sound exorbitant ....

[Bebu]

Re: £100 per claimant per year

«There were around 180 different schemes that you could claim against at that time.»

180 schemes sounds a bit fine grained. I can't imagine nearly two hundred ways of to screw up being a profitable agribusiness. ;)

Although £2 billon distributed among +90,000 farmers averages out at just over £20,000 each so not exactly a lottery win.

I imagine a system that is slightly less rigorous for and slightly more generous to farmers might be somewhat cheaper to run overall.

[Persona]

Re: £100 per claimant per year

You missing the point. It's not to be generous to farmers. Defra managers want large teams and the status that comes with them. Processing 100 page forms are just one way of achieving that.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: £100 per claimant per year

I'm sure that's all been simplified as part of your Brexit benefits.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: £100 per claimant per year

Forms? They still offer dead tree edition as an option?

[Tron]

Go back to paper forms.

And save a tonne of money.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Go back to paper forms.

No, the whole idea was to electronificate the process to capure the data as I recall from a previous life not directly involved with it I should say.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fails the sniff test

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.

a former employee or contractor of DEFRA/RPA providing services to DEFRA/RPA resulting in a £31.7m payday when selling his business, i wonder if DEFRA/RPA was the only customer.

Environment Agency is also part of DEFRA/RPA.

is the RPA still needed to dish out those payments?

[Anonymous Coward]

Only £3m a year?

To support (and develop!) something you've never seen before?

Only an idiot would go for it without a "no liability" clause.

[MarkMLl]

OK, but can't you at least tell us what these "legacy systems" are?

Are they frontended by PC desktop apps?

Is the backend on a single server site or is it (in principle) distributed and fault-(in)tolerant?

What's the backend: PC-based servers or Sun Enterprise? Or SGI because of the mapping involvement? or (Lord help us) S/360 running on three layers of emulation?

[TimMaher]

Re: legacy systems.

Excel obvs.

[deive]

2 billion / 90 000 = 22 222.22

[trevorde]

What happened next

DEFRA announces project to replace RPA with Oracle

[xyz]

Moo...

The existing system probably comprises a scanner, pc and a shared drive. Ooh and an excel spreadsheet.

The new one will be AI enabled, secured by blockchain, cloud based and will be ready when the cows come home.