Examination of Witnesses (Questions 860-879)
MR TONY
COOPER, MR
SIMON VRY
AND MR
IAN HEWETT
27 NOVEMBER 2006
Q860 Chairman: What is that dependent
upon?
Mr Cooper: It is the targets that
are in the Operating Business Plan.
Q861 Chairman: Your hitting the 96.14%
payments triggers a bonus payment to you?
Mr Cooper: Provided that target
is met, yes, it would.
Q862 Chairman: Is your salary and
bonus package on a par with Mr McNeill's, or a more generous one?
Mr Cooper: It is on a par.
Q863 Chairman: What about Mr Vry
and Mr Hewett and the other members of your senior team, are they
on performance-related bonuses as well?
Mr Cooper: They are on a different
arrangement, because they have targets to achieve but no pre-defined
bonus. Under the present scheme, their performance would be considered
by the Defra Pay Committee, as with other senior civil servants.
Q864 Sir Peter Soulsby: Just to clarify
this, Mr Cooper, you are expecting to be with the Agency until
2008, and at the end of that period a recovery plan is to be in
place, and by that time you are expecting the Agency to be stable
and delivering?
Mr Cooper: Yes. Just to clarify;
what I would anticipate is that the business strategy that we
will produce for going forward will incorporate a recovery programme,
whatever those actions are. I would anticipate that would be as
part of the business plan that we produce for the Agency, and
if we did it on time that should be published in April, and we
will work towards that. That would set out what we were doing
for the 2007 and 2008 schemes and what I would anticipate is that
you would see some visible improvements in the 2007 scheme and
have stability in the 2008 scheme.
Q865 Sir Peter Soulsby: Can we take
you to the issue of part payments. The decision not to make part
payments immediately, is that based on the risk of disallowance,
or on the effect that will have on your ability to cope with making
full payments?
Mr Cooper: Disallowance is certainly
a factor in there, but the fundamental question was when would
the partial payment solution be available, and I had to form a
judgment, and therefore make a recommendation, of when I could
commit to that solution being available and working, and therefore
provide a predictable date as to when payments could be made.
That, combined with the more we can do, in terms of validation
and making full payments, has got to be the best result that we
can achieve, so we want to try to do as much of that as we can
in the period up until partial payments are made. The partial
payments, yes, potentially, it could run and carry a risk of disallowance,
if we cannot get sufficient validation done.
Q866 Sir Peter Soulsby: What attitude
have the European Commission taken to partial payments?
Mr Cooper: They have provided
for partial payments and we are working towards trying to comply
with those regulations.
Q867 Chairman: Could I ask, in terms
of the work you are going to be doing to improve the operation
of the Payment Scheme, does that involve further software modifications?
Mr Cooper: It will do. During
the process of getting to the starting-point with the Single Payment
Scheme the contract was a fixed-price contract and it had specific
items to deliver. During that process some items were either moved
to this current financial year or were descoped. Management information
is a good example, where that was taken out of the solution which
was provided for the 2005 scheme; therefore, if you call that
software, which I do, that is part of the service that we are
buying from the contractor.
Q868 Chairman: From Accenture?
Mr Cooper: From Accenture, yes.
Q869 Chairman: Just to be clear,
are you going to have to find extra pounds to pay Accenture to
do some of this work, or because it was a fixed-price contract
you have paid them all the money they are going to get and in
the next two years they are still going to have to do certain
other tasks?
Mr Cooper: No. The fixed-price
contract was for the deliverables up to the point of the Single
Payment Scheme going live. We have now embarked on a new contract,
which this year is the mechanism by which we are buying the services
that we are getting from them.
Q870 Chairman: Does that represent
additional expenditure which was not planned for, or have you
got a line in the budget written for continuing IT expenditure?
Mr Cooper: The budget includes
the expenditure which I am talking about now.
Q871 Chairman: It is not like the
extra staff; in other words, it is not another £23m, or whatever
the right number is?
Mr Cooper: It is included in the
overall costs of the Agency, at £223m. We included the estimates
of the additional services that we would need from Accenture in
that.
Q872 David Taylor: Is there a definition
of `going live' Mr Cooper?
Mr Cooper: Let us call it the
period when the last release was delivered, which I think was
June 2006 this year.
Q873 Chairman: I suppose, roughly
speaking, it is round about another £20m in IT. If we look
at paragraph seven of your Forward Plan, you say: "Additional
funding of £46 million has been agreed with Defra, split
between running costs and capital to cover planned staff costs
and project expenditure (including software development to support
the 2006 and 2007 Schemes)." Is that a rough ballpark figure?
Mr Cooper: That is right, yes.
Obviously, that sum also includes the additional policy changes
which we have to make, so it is policy as well as the items that
have been descoped, like management information.
Q874 Lynne Jones: What problems are
you still having with RITA, and how does this square with Accenture's
assurance that their system is stable and functioning?
Mr Cooper: The RITA system is
a complex system and a collection of services and it has been
operating quite effectively. It is not necessarily easy to use,
I do not believe, I would not describe it as a user-friendly system,
but in terms of its functions then those functions work, and work
every day. There can be many reasons why there is a difficulty
for some of our staff, for example, and it may not be caused by
RITA, it may be another part of the IT tools that they use, because
they use more than RITA.
Q875 Lynne Jones: Could you give
an example?
Mr Cooper: We use a different
system for tracking correspondence, for example, and there are
obviously networks and infrastructure which are not provided under
the RITA service.
Q876 Lynne Jones: That was known
when the RITA contract was set up, that there was no interrelationship
between the systems?
Mr Cooper: It was, yes. The different
suppliers work together to make sure that it all gels, so the
information flowing along the infrastructure in the pipes, the
networks, that is provided by a different supplier, but obviously
they work together.
Q877 Lynne Jones: You just said that
they do not work together very well?
Mr Cooper: No; sorry. The systems
within RITA and the interfaces do not work necessarily in the
way that I would describe as user-friendly. Our processors have
to work with multiple screens to be able to perform transactions,
which makes their job more complex.
Q878 Lynne Jones: Is this because
of the task-based system?
Mr Cooper: It is not, necessarily.
A task-based system, I think everybody knows that we are moving
away from task-based and dealing with a whole case. In a way,
there is nothing wrong with task-based systems. My personal view
is, where we have to make the adjustment is taking a case and
attaching to it the task which would have been scattered across
the organisation. The way it was designed, it was a fairly random
sort of distribution of the task across the organisation, which
led to lots of confusion, because, for example, different processors
could contact the same customer, they could be working on the
same case and they would not know that necessarily; whereas the
way we are going to work going forward is that one person or one
team will have control over what is happening on that case.
Q879 Lynne Jones: Mr Vry, you were
in charge of the Change Programme and the Change Programme involved
setting up the task-based system. Who was it who decided that
this was the way to go?
Mr Vry: My understanding is that
the original proposition for how the organisation should be structured
came out of the original business case which was created in 1999,
I believe. It sets the objective for the Agency to have a work-flow-based
system, which would allow task management, giving maximum flexibility
for the organisation, because running 60 or more schemes, as it
did at the time, the intention was that you would be able to use
staff across the sites to process more than one scheme each and
so maximise the flexibility. That was where the original proposition
came from.
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