As report reveals IT catastrophe, is Defra fit for purpose?

Defra launched a survey this week to ask the industry how its rollout of Extended Producer Responsibility could be better communicated.

Wags might suggest it’s the wrong question. Surely the better one would be: “Is there any way the rollout of the landmark environmental proposals could have been handled any worse?”

For Defra to be launching such a survey at this point in the process – almost six months after environment secretary Thérèse Coffey ordered emergency talks to salvage the government’s plans “at pace” – simply beggars belief.

But as a damning report suggests today, all of this could be irrelevant anyway.

If evidence from the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) is anything to go by, any survey answers are likely to end up gathering dust in a Whitehall cellar filled with the roar of computers the size of fridge freezers.

In fact, today’s verdict on the state of Defra’s IT infrastructure would make for great comedy material, if it wasn’t so serious.

The report paints a disturbing picture of downtrodden Defra officials swamped beneath mountains of paper. Computer systems, “where they do exist”, are out of date and vulnerable to failure and cyberattacks.

It’s not just the future of waste packaging that we are talking about here, important as it may be.

Defra is a department overseeing food safety, animal welfare, food shortages, air quality, water suppliers… the list goes on.

Yet it is so stuck in the dark ages that an estimated 14 million transactions per year are still carried out on paper. Some vets were even forced to buy old laptops to record cases of bovine tuberculosis because later ones didn’t work on Defra’s system.

What’s worse, a near £750m programme to update Defra’s systems could end up effectively being money flushed down the drain, the PAC warns. That’s because it has yet to decide on major changes to how the department will run, meaning the paper mountain is surely only going to get higher.

It’s suddenly easy to understand the reports of morale problems in Defra, which have been doing the rounds for quite some time.

To add even more misery to the mayhem, deluded ministers are also somehow expecting Defra to handle the majority of more than 4,000 pieces of former EU regulation that needs to be either dropped, adapted or replaced, supposedly by the end of this year. Although the chances of that happening are as slim as a Defra download working first time.

As The Grocer reports today, logistics bosses are warning the supply chain faces yet more chaos as a result.

So even though this report primarily concerns IT, it gets to the heart of so much more that needs to be addressed by the ministers charged with supporting the food and drink industry and the environment. 

As the PAC recommendations set out in brutal, simple terms, Defra should “set out how it will identify the problems and costs faced by its service users as a result of unmodernised services, and how it is going to address each of them”.

It doesn’t get much more back to basics than that. And you don’t have to be a computer programmer to understand the consequences of failing to meet those recommendations.