Review reveals RPA's IT cost overruns

The document, published on 20 July 2010, says that based on Operational Efficiency Programme figures the RPA's £250m IT costs over the last three years are twice as high as the typical spend by an agency of its size and scope. In 2009-10 the RPA spent £82.8m on IT. This was equivalent to 31% of its net operating costs, and considerably more than the 6.5% figure for its parent department, the Department for the Environment Food and Rural Affairs, as a whole. RPA figures for the previous two years are similar. In 2008-09 it spent £82m or 27% of net operating cost and in 2007-08 it spent £85m or 32%. "This benchmark puts RPA in a peer group with HMRC and the banking/insurance industries, which are dealing with larger customer populations (by an order of 100) and, arguably, much broader sets of customer needs," says the report. The findings were published following a review, commissioned by Defra in September 2009, and led by independent reviewer David Lane working with Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Gartner. The reviewers say they were struck by a lack of clear arrangements for designing and governing the agency's processes and putting these at the centre of decisions about automation and IT. The RPA's 140 applications vary from core scheme processing, such as the claim processing system known as RITA, through to legacy databases maintained for compliance purposes, such as the Milk Quota database, HR and finance applications. According to the report, new systems are commissioned in response to new schemes or changed requirements and each has a different scope, architecture and approach to data handling. As a result, customer data is duplicated and held in different formats in different places. Data is often held and used locally in various systems, in ways that vary between systems depending on the scheme. "Since the well publicised problems in implementing the Single Payment Scheme in 2005-06, RPA has made significant improvements, particularly in the speed of making payments to customers," says the report. "This has been achieved against a backdrop of a poorly specified IT system, which constrained the ability of staff to get the job done, and reducing staff numbers." Large sections of the report have been removed, however, to "avoid compromising any future commercial decisions and actions by Defra and the RPA". The authors have expressed a concern that "the integrity of the report is adversely affected by these redactions".