Examination of Witnesses (Questions 980-989)
MR TONY
COOPER, MR
SIMON VRY
AND MR
IAN HEWETT
27 NOVEMBER 2006
Q980 David Taylor: They said that
you were the one with whom they had day-to-day contact?
Mr Vry: As Programme Director,
yes, but I was not the IT specialist.
Q981 Lynne Jones: Who was the IT
specialist on the RPA side?
Mr Vry: We had Alan McDermott,
who was our IT expert.
Q982 Chairman: Hang on, Mr Vry; when
you say the term Programme Director, does that mean you were responsible
for the whole of the process doing what it was supposed to do?
Mr Vry: I was responsible for
managing the team to deliver the RPA Change Programme.
Q983 Chairman: Who was the person
who was actually responsible, to say "It will do what it
says on the tin"? I presume that was Johnston McNeill, was
it?
Mr Vry: There was a process in
place by which staff who were involved in the testing—
Q984 Chairman: No, no. Mr Vry; sorry.
Let us get away from a lot of the complicated speak. As a layman,
a simple question: who was the person in the RPA responsible for
asking the searching question "Will this system pay out cheques
when it says it is going to; have we established if that will
happen?"?
Mr Vry: First of all, the system
itself does not pay out cheques, it relies on another system.
Q985 Chairman: No; sorry to be awkward.
You are talking in systems. I am a simple politician, right. I
come back. I was responsible in Government for self-assessment,
and the question I used to ask was, "When taxpayers send
in their form, will it work, will it calculate how much tax, and
will it work, will it be okay?" People came back and gave
me some answers and, with the benefit of hindsight, it did work.
That was a simple question. It is a simple question I am asking
about this. All the bits that are in the box labelled "Single
Farm Payment Scheme," did anybody actually ask the question
"Is what's inside the box going to produce at a moment in
time, the end of February, cheques to send out to farmers?"?
If the somebody said, "Well, no, we haven't found out if
the box works; we've done a few bits in the box, we don't know
whether if you join it all together cheques will come out,"
who should have done that?
Mr Vry: The answer to the question
is, yes, the system, the whole box, did pay out cheques in February,
payments did go through and were made starting in February. The
answer to your question is, that did happen.
Q986 Chairman: Yes, but you did not
actually run the thing with sufficient flow-through to find out
that as soon as it started then it stopped. You have just said
that the real problem was the validation process, right? I presume
you are saying, yes, the machine produced bits of paper, then
before they could go out there was another bit in the process
which stopped that happening?
Mr Vry: It was the authorisation
process which gummed up.
Q987 Chairman: Alright, let us focus
on that. Why was not the authorisation bit ever tested?
Mr Vry: That was tested, but obviously
not well enough and, when we implemented it, it did gum up. We
thought payments would be being authorised and going through;
what was happening was, the way in which the payments were being
batched together, when staff came to authorise them it meant that
far more were stopped than we had anticipated, and that is what
we went in to address.
Q988 Chairman: If you like, the dress
rehearsal really was not thorough enough to find out if all the
actors knew their lines?
Mr Vry: The point being though
that the system did process and validate and ultimately authorise
and, in another part of the system, pay the claims, and we started
making those in February. What we got wrong was obviously that
we did not get anywhere near the volume through the authorisation
process that we had expected to, having validated 30 or so% in
February. We had anticipated that those would go through in early
March; because of the authorisation blockages, that did not happen.
Then, beyond that, the actual process of validation took longer
than we had anticipated; it worked but it took longer than we
had anticipated, and that was the issue.
Q989 David Taylor: Because it had not
been piloted, it had not been tested, it had not had a dry run?
Mr Vry: It had not been end-to-end
tested, absolutely, as I said earlier on, that case had not been
happening. The incremental way in which we had to deliver the
system in elements meant that became impossible to do in the timeframe.
Chairman: Gentlemen, it has been a long
session and you have done your best to answer our questions. We
are very grateful to you for the information that you have been
able to give us. We are also grateful for your kindness in offering
to provide specific written replies to a number of questions that
we have asked. Mr Cooper, I think, on behalf of the Committee
and all those who have written to us in the past, particularly
farmers with individual problems, we send you our very best wishes
for success in your endeavours and the sincere hope that, although
we would like to see you again, it is not to go over problems
in the 2006-07 or 2008 payment window that you are working very
hard with your colleagues to sort out. Thank you all very much.
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