Examination of Witnesses (Questions 620-639)
MR SEAN
SHINE, MR
PETER HOLMES
AND MR
ANDY NAISH
22 MAY 2006
Q620 Mr Drew: I understand that as
well. It is not conceptually difficult. So why on earth were ministers
being advised by whomsoever that it really would lead to problems
with delivering the final system were any effort or priority to
be given to interim payments, which is a relatively straight forward
thing to do. Why were you not asked to do that? Here you are,
you are the delivers of this contract. You have the credibility
on the line of delivering the whole contract, but somebody then
comes to you in 2005 and says, "We've got to have a contingency;
we've got to have a plan B". We are always in this Committee
looking for what plan B is, and yet they say, "No, we're
going to do plan B, we just want you to assist them." Why
do you think they did that? Why did they not come to you to do
plan B?
Mr Holmes: I am not answering
the question directly, but I will do. The concerns about partial
payments were not about the ease of how you make the software
change in order to make partial payments, it was more about best
practice saying that people should be kept focused on the main
objective and, secondly, understanding all the EU implications
of disqualification and all those kinds of things. It was not
technology issue.
Q621 Mr Drew: Were you not a bit
miffed when you know that they were using their own people to
develop a partial payment system when they had to use your system
to deliver that? Did you not say to them, "We of course could
do the partial payment system? You will have to pay us a bit more
money but we can do this?"
Mr Holmes: Not at all. As was
said earlier, our system is one of a number of IT systems that
co-exist with other systems in what is going on outside our area.
Chairman: Before I bring Peter in, you
will let us know when the first test on the partial payment system
was conducted so that you knew that the interface between the
RPA software systems worked.
Q622 Sir Peter Soulsby: Can I just
play back to you what I understand you to have been saying to
us. Correct me if I am misrepresenting what you have said. Is
it fair to say that you are telling us that your IT systems worked
perfectly and in good time? The pre-existing related IT systems
worked well and were not the cause of the problem. The problems
were with what you described as the business processes and that
despite your intimate relationship with the project you could
not reasonably have been expected to realise these problems nor
could the permanent secretary. The only person who might have
spotted these was the chief executive of the Rural Payment Agency.
Let me stop there and see whether I have correctly understood
what you are saying?
Mr Holmes: We are saying that
our IT systems worked against the specification as a group. Earlier
Andy said that he was not aware that there were any issues with
the rest of the IT system. The rest of your comment we are not
saying.
Q623 Sir Peter Soulsby: Let me try
those other bits and you can tell me what you disagree with. Are
you saying to us that you could not reasonably be expected to
have seen the problems that were emerging with the system?
Mr Holmes: Yes, we are saying
that we did not have oversight and were not in a position to do
so.
Q624 Sir Peter Soulsby: Nor could
the permanent secretaries because they were taking advice from
you and indeed from others. You were intimately involved with
them and if you could not spot it you could not expect them to
either.
Mr Holmes: I am not in a position
to say that.
Q625 Sir Peter Soulsby: I think it
is probably a fair inference. You are also stopping short of saying
that the only person who could have spotted it was the chief executive
of the Rural Payments Agency. I understand why you might want
to stop short of that. We understand that at least as far as you
are concerned you did your job perfectly. You are then saying
that the problem was with these business processors and you are
saying that the particular thing that gummed-up the system was
the validation and approval element of what was necessary. Am
I right in understanding that? That is a particular part that
you focus on as being the cause of the problem. Can I just explore
that? Are you saying that in that particular element there was
a lack of people to deal with it? Was there a lack of information
for those who were dealing with it or that there was some problem
with the processors?
Mr Holmes: I am not sure that
we are saying that. I am not sure we are in a position to say
that.
Mr Shine: Our view would be that
it could be any or all of those issues, but as we have said we
are not managing that process and your question to us is quite
precise. It could be any of them or all of them but we were not
involved in managing that process. As I said, we already have
our hands full in building and testing the IT systems and delivering
goals and supporting them so we are focusing on this. We have
observed that one of those areas you mentioned was slower than
the target would have been, but in terms of the causative reasons
for that we could not speculate specifically.
Q626 Sir Peter Soulsby: Can you remind
the Committee of the value of this project to your company?
Mr Shine: The total value of the
original contract is £54 million.
Q627 Sir Peter Soulsby: So this was
a £54 million project for your company. Your company was
intimately involved with it, indeed was right at the heart of
the delivery of a system that would make this project deliver
and you are not able to tell us what actually went wrong with
the business processes that failed to deliver it on time.
Mr Shine: Not specifically. Let
us go right back to where we started. There is a jigsaw of multiple
components involved in ultimately delivering payments to farmers.
We have specific responsibility for certain IT components for
that. Obviously our focus is to ensure that we deliver that to
specification, which we have done. The costs for those components
was £53.8 million to be precise. While we are aware of the
delays in the business process we are not specifically involved
in managing that and in monitoring that on a day to day basis.
Q628 Sir Peter Soulsby: You are saying
that despite having a contract here for £53.8 million you,
as a company, did not show an interest in what was actually causing
the thing to become gummed-up and failing to deliver?
Mr Holmes: We did show an interest
but our contract is very clear about what is in scope and what
is not in scope and the contract is very clear about what our
authority is and what our responsibilities are.
Q629 Chairman: I think I understand
where you three are coming from. You are saying that you will
speak about the things that Accenture were contracted to do and
for which you have direct management responsibility. Notwithstanding
the fact that sitting where you are you would have seen what was
happening in the landscape around you, you are not prepared to
comment or express a view about what was happening on the bits
that were peripheral to the areas for which you were directly
responsible. Is that fair comment?
Mr Holmes: No, I do not think
it is fair comment. If you take what happens on a day to day basis
in the RPA offices dealing with those business processes we did
not have visibility.
Q630 Chairman: Were you ever asked—by
Mr Addison, Mr McNeill or Helen Ghosh from your standpoint as
experts in systems and what makes things tick and with the knowledge
you had of this process of the single farm payment—to give
any opinion or express any view about the problems at all to anybody
who had a senior responsibility from the customer side for this
process?
Mr Holmes: I do not believe we
were.
Mr Shine: We have actually discussed
earlier on where we have given views and when we sat in sessions
with the permanent secretaries in terms of focusing on our aspects
we would have frequently talked about the fact that this is our
responsibility. There are a whole number of other areas that we
are not responsible for. In order to deliver the entire process
successfully you need to focus on all of those. As I say, we have
discussed that already. We would have had those generalised discussions.
Mr Naish: We would also have been
asked if there was anything we could do to change the IT system
that might help. We were also asked to do a workshop which Mr
Addison organised. We were asked if there were things we could
do to the IT system in quick order that might make a difference
to speed those things up.
Q631 Sir Peter Soulsby: Did you not
think with a £53.8 million stake in this contract you had
a moral responsibility if not a contractual responsibility for
understanding why it was not delivered?
Mr Holmes: We cannot have a responsibility
because you cannot have responsibility without authority and without
resources and we had none of those things.
Q632 Sir Peter Soulsby: You did not
even have a responsibility for understanding why the project was
not going to deliver never mind actually having responsibility
to do something about it. I accept that was somebody else's. Did
you not have a responsibility for understanding what was going
wrong?
Mr Holmes: It is impossible to
have a detailed understanding when you are not actually on the
ground.
Q633 Sir Peter Soulsby: I would suggest
with a contract of £53.8 million you do not just have a contractual
responsibility you have a moral responsibility for understanding
why it is not delivering and for telling people what it is that
is going wrong.
Mr Holmes: I disagree with that
because we did not have the oversight to do that.
Q634 Lynne Jones: Mr Naish, you mentioned
workshops. When did these take place?
Mr Naish: There was a specific
one very early on after Mr Addison came on board.
Q635 Lynne Jones: What date are you
talking about?
Mr Naish: I do not have a specific
date, but quite quickly after Mr Addison came on board.
Q636 Lynne Jones: What year?
Mr Naish: This year.
Q637 Lynne Jones: The increase in
the volume of the land parcels, did that in any way contribute
to the increase in the contract value on the revenue side?
Mr Shine: There would have been
some changes round the IT both hardware and software in the late
summer of last year to increase capacity to the new level and
so there would have been some costs there. I do not have the specifics
here but there would have been some as a result.
Q638 Lynne Jones: Can you give us
some idea of the increase that led to?
Mr Shine: I will get back to you
on that.
Q639 Chairman: When Mark Addison
came into post to sort the job out, did he gather together in
one room all of the key players and tell you what he had found
and what he thought needed to be done?
Mr Shine: As I have said already,
I met with him individually with other officials to ensure that
we were doing whatever he wanted us to do. As Andy has already
pointed out there was a series of workshops that he could have
convened. However, at the time our focus was to ensure that the
system was doing what it needed to do. His request in that first
meeting was to ensure that the system remains available for as
much as he requires. Our job was to ensure that that happened
and that in fact happened. We continued to make the system available
as we had done since October from 6 am to 9 pm, so 15 hours a
day, five days a week plus 10 hours a day over both weekend days.
So there was quite a long time of availability during every week
which was a requirement in order that the users could subsequently
use the system in order to do the work that they wanted to do.
That was the primary request, to ensure a stable system and an
available system and that is what we delivered.
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