By Tash Shifrin
25 March 2010The troubled Rural Payments Agency has admitted it will still be ‘some time’ before it fixes the IT systems that have left the £1.6bn Single Payments Scheme for farmers mired in crisis since 2005.
The Commons Public Accounts Committee has repeatedly criticised the RPA and its parent, the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. The fiasco has left farmers out of pocket and the department facing costs of hundreds of millions of pounds.
The committee attacked ‘comprehensively poor administration on a grand scale’ in its December report. It focused on the agency’s £350m IT system, which was at risk of becoming obsolete.
Data held in the system remained ‘riddled with errors’, the MPs said. Efforts to keep the IT systems running continued to ‘soak up’ money, with another £84m handed to contractors Accenture in the past two years.
But, in a response buried in Treasury minutes this month, Defra said it only ‘partially’ accepted the PAC’s recommendation that it should draw up a business case for a new IT system.
It said forthcoming European Union negotiations on farming subsidies from 2013 would ‘dictate the IT requirements for the scheme’. This meant fixing the IT systems was ‘likely to run for some time’.
A spokeswoman told Public Finance that the IT overhaul would ‘in large part’ depend on how long EU negotiations went on – ‘something over which the UK does not have control’.
Defra also rejected the PAC’s recommendation that an external organisation should ‘tidy up and clean each claim’. It said this had been estimated to cost up to £100m.
The department admitted it had already spent around £119m to ensure the data that forms the basis of the annual payments was correct, with another £700,000 spent on ‘system changes’ between August and November 2009.
