Defra running 13 projects worth £289m

17 Nov 2008 17:53

The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has revealed a complex, late-running and expensive programme of large IT projects

The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has revealed a complex, late-running and expensive programme of large IT projects.

Its roster of 13 projects worth £1m-plus adds up to £289m, more than the Department for Transport and its agencies, which have six £1m-plus projects worth a total of £273m. Of five projects where comparable data is available, Defra has moved back the deadlines on three since February this year.

Defra's largest projects are the Animal Health Business Reform Programme, worth £98m, and the Whole Farm Approach project, worth £74m. The latter is still on the deadline of March 2011 that the department quoted in February. But the £15m Spatial Information Repository programme's deadline has moved back from March 2009 to August, while the £1.73m Customer Land Database has been delayed from March to October of next year.

The department's Renew IT programme, costing £3.8m and moving its 10,000 staff to energy-efficient laptops, was due in February to end in September this year, but is now scheduled to finish in March 2009. However, its quoted budget has fallen from £9.8m. It is being run by IBM, the department's main IT supplier.

Defra's project list also includes four projects for the Rural Payments Agency worth £52.4m, including an upgrade to the Single Payment System costing £23.7m by November 2009. Separately, the department also lists a Common Agricultural Policy Health Check Implementation Programme costing £25.3m.

Defra has been severely criticised in the recent past for its IT failings, along with Accenture which acted as its contractor, over payments to farmers through the agency. In July, Parliament's Public Accounts Committee said that each claim made through the Single Payment System cost about £750, often exceeding the value of the claim itself. Nearly 20,000 farmers received incorrect payments and £37m in overpayments were made.

The information on Defra was released by minister Huw Irranca-Davies in response to a parliamentary written question from shadow treasury minister Mark Hoban on 12 November, 2008, while the earlier figures from February were released to Liberal Democrat shadow chancellor Vincent Cable.

Other questions from Hoban show that Defra is unusual in the number and scale of its projects. The Department of Health and its agencies have a much a larger headline total — but only because of Connecting for Health's National Programme for IT, worth £12.7bn. Apart from that, the department has seven £1m plus projects worth £14.7m.

Similarly, the Department for Children, Families and Schools has £367m of large projects, but the list of eight is dominated by the £224m children's database ContactPoint. The other seven projects are worth £143m in aggregate.

Story URL: http://news.zdnet.co.uk/itmanagement/0,1000000308,39554857,00.htm