Scrutiny of farm IT fiasco hampered claim MSPS

While a number of areas of concern were highlighted in a specialist independent report into whether the Scottish Government’s much criticised IT system for the delivery of farm support payments was fit for purpose, it was claimed yesterday that there was no need to “move to plan B” and start again from scratch.

A stormy meeting of the Scottish Parliament’s rural economy committee yesterday danced around the report’s findings, claiming that proper scrutiny of the report had been hampered by the fact that the full findings were being kept under wraps due to “commercial sensitivities”.

And while the committee itself had received only an executive summary, cabinet secretary Fergus Ewing claimed the report had found that the “basic architecture” of the system was sound, but admitted that a number of major issues remained to be addressed.

He said that the independent technical assessment carried out by IT specialists Fujitsu had reassured him that no “plan B” was required and the best way to move forward was to deal with the remedial measures which were required to give the system full functionality.

However North-east MSP, Peter Chapman said: “No matter how you try to spin it this is a highly critical report.”

And he asked if the system would ever be fit for purpose – and if so at what cost.

The investigation found that code developed to meet functionality issues had “not met industry best practice” and the details of some of the programming changes had not been fully documented, making it more difficult to revisit these areas in the future.

Thecommitteeexpressed anger that it was unable to access the full report and that its scrutiny was limited by the fact that it had been asked not to quote directly from the summary.

While it was revealed that some of the restrictions on the report were due to commercial discussions currently ongoing with the major contractor CGI, Elinor Mitchell, the Scottish Government’s director of agriculture and rural communities, added that some of the defects encountered in the technical aspects could leave the system vulnerable to cyber-attack.

Questioned on the current functionality of system which was set to meet peak load of the 2017 single application forms (SAF) inputs in coming days, Ewing said that it had been markedly improved upon previous years. However it was also revealed that over the past couple of weeks the work on 2016 payments had been put on hold to allow the system to concentrate on 2017 applications coming in.

Although this had slowed down the rate at which 2016 payments were being made, Ewing said he was still confident that the “vast majority” would be paid out to farmers by the EU’S deadline at the end of June.

Questioned as to when 2017 payments would be made, Ewing said he expected continuing improvements in the system – but gave an undertaking that should a further loan scheme prove necessary at the end of the year, subject to regulations and parliamentary approval, he would ensure that it was delivered.