Select Committee on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 480-499)

MR SEAN SHINE, MR PETER HOLMES AND MR ANDY NAISH

22 MAY 2006

  Q480  Mr Williams: As part of your contract did you have an agreement to have embedded in your organisation experienced members of the RPA?

  Mr Naish: We worked very closely with the RPA in a number of places assisting development. They are not embedded in our organisation in that sense but we worked in joint teams on a few specification phases and also through testing phases.

  Q481  David Taylor: What is your idea of having RPA staff embedded in your organisation?

  Mr Naish: I am assuming you are thinking about having RPA staff and reporting to Accenture management.

  Q482  David Taylor: Possibly, or the other way round. What is your perception?

  Mr Naish: From the way the question was phrased I assumed the former.

  Q483  Mr Williams: Did you have either? Was either system operating then, either you having RPA people working in your organisation, reporting to you, giving you the benefit of their knowledge of how their systems have worked in the past and their way of working with their customers?

  Mr Naish: We have had RPA people working with us but not in a reporting line to Accenture.[4]


  Q484 Mr Williams: Were the RPA willing to enter into that type of arrangement? Were you happy with the quality of staff from the RPA?

  Mr Naish: We have had good quality staff from the RPA working with us.

  Q485  Mr Williams: When you signed your contract in the beginning of 2003 it was against the background of the change programme without any knowledge of the complexity of the systems that you might have to deliver in the future.

  Mr Holmes: We had made our own assumptions and estimates about the complexity of the system based on supporting the existing scheme so there were a lot of opportunities to understand the existing schemes and the technology that supported them today and therefore the technology that would be needed for the future.

  Q486  Mr Williams: Then in May 2004 you updated your contract. We are told that even after that there were 60 changes in the scheme that you finally had to deliver programmes for. Is that true, or is it an under-estimate or an over-estimate?

  Mr Shine: I do not have the precise number but that scale of change sound reasonable. As we have outlined already the final parts of the detail for the CAP policy were only finalised in December 2004. That time frame generated a series of changes and, as we have said, the specific detail can have a significant impact on the system. I do not know the precise number but that does not sound unreasonable in terms of the amount of changes. The precise rules would be finalised based on policy direction.

  Q487  Mr Williams: Our line of inquiry has been criticised, that we are spending too much time on the decision to go in for the dynamic hybrid and the effect that that has had on the inability to deliver and the chaos that has resulted from that. Somebody has told us that the problem was fundamentally the inability of the Rural Land Register Mapping system to work efficiently and talked of a payment system both technically and in management terms. You are saying that that is not the case.

  Mr Shine: Absolutely. The Rural Land Register stores land parcels. There are currently over 2.5 million parcels of land stored on that system. It is a working system; it is there; it is storing all the land details. In terms of the period that you referred to, there was, as I have already commented, firstly an increase in the number of customers from around 80,000 up to around 120,000. Somewhere in the region of a 50% increase in customers were registering for the first time directly as a result of some of the policy decisions to include all land types and all land owner types or land user types. That was the first part of the change. The second part was the entire policy around CAP reform was based on shifting to land usage. The nature of the rules that were identified out of the directions that were taken meant that the customers were then focused on their land. There were a lot of land changes generated at a much higher volume. I have already spoken about the numbers; well over 100,000 land changes would have come in when the typical expectation prior to that for a typical year was around 9,000. So in excess of 11 times the number of changes plus 50% increase in the number of customers. That drove the fact that there was some system availability and stability issues during the summer[5]. As I have already referred to, they were addressed and dealt with and they are now working fully and have been for some time. They were the facts that happened during that period.


  Q488 Mr Williams: Was there any expectation either in your first contract or the amended contract in 2004 that the payments should be delivered at the beginning of the payment envelope?

  Mr Shine: When the broad policy for CAP reform began to pin down in the first number of months in 2004 we were able to take a broad view of what effort it would take in order to deliver the components of the system that would subsequently be required to establish entitlements and subsequently make payments. In about February of 2004[6] when we looked at that it appeared that at that point that the December[7] date was not possible. At that time the target date was February. At about the end of the first quarter in 2004[8] our target date was to ensure that the payments were capable of being made in February 2006. As we have already said, the first payments were made in February 2006 in terms of delivering on our commitments. We did that and, as I have also said, our system components that were required for that were delivered as per schedule in October 2005. The final piece of the component that was required for establishing entitlements was done in October. The final piece that was required for doing all the task updates for those particular pieces was done in July 2005, all in advance of the February target date. As I have said, the February target date was achieved and the first payments were made then.




  Q489 Sir Peter Soulsby: You have told us how you and your company were intimately involved with and responsible for the systems that were at the heart of this project. Therefore obviously you needed to understand the totality of the project even though it was not within your direct responsibility. You have told us about the very close working relationship that you had with the permanent secretaries and with others involved there. You have also described the changes that were taking place, the increase in the number of customers involved which, being intimately involved, you were clearly very well aware of. You are saying that at no stage did you tell the permanent secretary that it was not going to deliver, does that therefore mean that you, like the permanent secretary, were completely taken by surprise when the chief executive of the Rural Payments Agency announced that it was not going to happen?

  Mr Shine: Yes.

  Q490  Sir Peter Soulsby: You were completely taken by surprise.

  Mr Shine: Yes.

  Q491  Sir Peter Soulsby: Do you not think that might be difficult for us to understand? Can you perhaps explain, if it was not your systems that did work, if it was not the related systems did not work (you have said they were all fine), how we might remain puzzled as to what it was that gummed-up?

  Mr Shine: Certainly as was discussed last week and it seemed to be discussed in some detail, making payments is the final stage in a whole series of steps that have to happen in terms of identifying the cost for establishing the entitlements, working through all the tasks in terms of any land changes, corrections need to be made, ending up finally with entitlements being established and subsequently payments being made. There are quite a lot of steps to be done. As we have said already, the system components that we were responsible for were in place. We have also said that we were not directly responsible for the other components but our understanding was that steps were being taken to ensure that those tasks were in hand. We were not monitoring on a daily basis or on a frequent basis; we did not have a direct view of that. As I have said, from what we could see the technical components were in place to get to that point.

  Q492  Sir Peter Soulsby: Despite your intimate involvement and responsibility for the heart of this project you were not involved and did not think it necessary for you to be involved in making sure that the project actually delivered. Is that really what you are saying?

  Mr Shine: No, that is not what we are saying. As I have said we were specifically responsible for delivering the system components and we continued to do that and continued to focus on that. That does require on-going work in terms of making changes and, as you are aware, in the recent past we were focusing on ensuring the system components were there to make partial payments. We continued to be very busy focusing on that aspect. As I have said, we have one part of the process that we focus on ensuring we deliver and as was discussed in great detail last week the points were made that it was the bigger business process, there were a lot of components that had to happen. The IT system was there and ready for it but other parts of the process did not work as fast as had been expected.

  Q493  Chairman: Let me pursue Peter's line of questions because I, too, am a bit stuck here. You said a few moments ago, Mr Shine, that the payments were made at the end of February. According to paragraph 24 of your evidence, "Release 3a2—the core batch function required to establish entitlement and authorise payments went live on 3 October 2005". Was there another process after that for which you were not responsible which actually delivered the payments or was batch 3a2 the bit that delivered the payments?

  Mr Naish: The 3a2 release included the last pieces of functionality required to make payments.

  Q494  Chairman: Mr Naish, please can you speak in layman's terms. What does that mean, it included the last piece of functionality? Just tell me, did 3a2 contain the bit that enabled the cheque to reach the farmer?

  Mr Naish: The piece of the system that actually writes a cheque and sends it to the farmer is not part of the RITA system. That already existed.

  Q495  Chairman: The bit that writes the cheque or transmits the money is not yours.

  Mr Naish: Exactly.

  Q496  Chairman: Where do you stop and where does that bit start?

  Mr Naish: Perhaps I could describe the last stages of the process.

  Q497  Chairman: Yes, by all means.

  Mr Naish: The last steps of the process through to getting payment out to the farmers are that once a claim has been fully validated, ie all the validation tasks created against that claim have been cleared, our system—the RITA system—goes through a number of steps. First of all it calculates the entitlement value for that claim and it calculates the monetary value associated with that level of entitlement for the land associated with the claim.

  Q498  David Taylor: Is cheque production down stream of the claim processing system?

  Mr Naish: Yes, it is.

  Q499  David Taylor: Cheque production is not you, claims processing is. Is that what you are saying?

  Mr Naish: Yes.


4   Note by witness: At various stages during the Programme, there have been individual Accenture people who have reported to the RPA. Back

5   Note by witness: This should be 2005. Back

6   Note by witness: This should be 2005. Back

7   Note by witness: Refers to December 2005. Back

8   Note by witness: This should be 2005. Back


 
previous page contents next page

House of Commons home page Parliament home page House of Lords home page search page enquiries index

© Parliamentary copyright 2007
Prepared 29 March 2007