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
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