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Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

The hon. Gentleman is right. There were many opportunities to make the process simpler, even in some of the idealistic choices that were being made. I add a further layer: even after the choice to have a more complex model was made, that choice was not stuck to. Instead, there were several flexes and changes, albeit for perfectly good reasons—people said, ““What about this or that?””, and changes were made. If choosing the dynamic model was almost suicidal, to permit wilful change after that point was actually suicidal and would have doomed the project to failure in any professional eye, although I cannot imagine which professional eyes were looking at it, because it is startling that the level of risk was not thought through and shouted from the rooftops for all to hear. I attended an Adjournment debate on the fiasco in the spring of last year—I think that the right hon. Member for Fylde (Mr. Jack) was there—in which the responding Minister, who had taken over responsibility for the task in the Commons, read out a number of the changes that had been made to simplify the process of handling individual claims. I remember intervening to point out that surely many of those steps could have been taken right from the start. One issue was the obsessive pursuit of tiny, trivial errors within a claim, relating to the precise area of the claim and other such matters. Those steps were not demanded by EU law; we had imposed them, in our usual, determined attempt to set a platinum standard for our administration of a system in this country. It was good of the Minister to be so candid about the changes that were being made to make it simpler to pay farmers, but it did lead one to wonder why anyone would design a system containing that kind of obsession, which would again accentuate the cost of the process and the risk of failure. The National Audit Office report is useful in cataloguing the review board’s reports on risk and the gateway reviews of the Office of Government Commerce. I do not know what that showed observers within the Department, but outside the Department, it painted an alarming picture of repetitive emphasis on risk and the difficulty of maintaining the project to deliver payments to farmers on course and on budget. No one with even a cursory knowledge of the reporting mechanisms for the project would have found it surprising that it was running into desperate difficulty and crisis. One can only wonder what those who received the documents ever did with them—a point to which I shall return briefly. The OGC may not be above criticism, and the Select Committee correctly highlighted some possible areas where it went wrong, to which I add one from a more technical perspective. I do not think that the OGC looked properly at the balance between business change—the human process side of getting people to do something in a particular way—and the system development element, which would allow those people to do those tasks more readily. In business change, those two elements are a seamless activity; to treat them in a discrete way, as the OGC does, to some extent, by saying, ““This is a systems project,”” risks the possibility of grave management error. The OGC analysis does not highlight firmly enough some of the failures regarding how human beings were expected to do certain tasks. So what are we going to do about this? What do we learn? First, it should be clear that reports that show such a risk should not merely be owned within the Department to which they are written. It is quite obvious that Departments have widely varying competences for managing major projects, and this Department had a very low competence. I have had some unkind exchanges with the Department’s former permanent secretary about his apparent lack of knowledge in this area. I did not think it was a good sign when he was first interviewed on information systems issues, and I do not think that he was well equipped to be a challenging leader of a Department going through such a process of technology-enabled change. So this should have been shared more widely. Secondly, we need to be constantly aware that these are not systems projects: this is a business change programme, starting way, way back. There is a long history, and it needs to be seen as a totality. We develop systems to help people to do a job better—they are not there for their own purposes—and we need to understand the process of managing the human beings far more in some ways than we need to be obsessed with the details of the technologies being used.