The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is a digital backwater that is struggling to upgrade ageing computer systems that are essential for the protection of UK public health and the environment, MPs have warned.
The House of Commons’ public accounts committee on Wednesday called for a “complete overhaul” of Defra after issuing a damning report into IT systems at the government department, which is responsible for monitoring food safety, air and water quality.
The committee heard that Defra and its agencies still use paper forms to handle about 14mn transactions a year. It highlighted that, until recently, systems for uploading test results of tuberculosis in cattle were so outdated that vets had to buy old laptops to run the government software.
The committee also found that Defra was struggling to recruit enough IT technicians and obtain sufficient funds for a £726mn modernisation programme due to be completed by 2025.
Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, deputy chair of the committee, said that Defra’s equipment was “outmoded and disconnected” and that its upgrade programme was “disjointed”.
“We are facing down rapidly spreading animal diseases, maybe the next pandemic, with systems that may rely on moving paper forms around. This cannot continue,” he said. “It’s time for a complete overhaul at Defra.”
The report also found the department was struggling to take a strategic approach to upgrading its applications partly because it had focused its efforts on more urgent areas, “such as implementing the IT systems needed for EU exit”.
Defra has long been one of Whitehall’s weakest departments, according to senior government officials, and has a significant extra workload as a result of Brexit, which has taken the UK out of the EU’s regulatory umbrella for food and chemical standards.
Officials and lobby groups recently told the Financial Times that the department was becoming “increasingly dysfunctional”.
A report published last month by the National Audit Office, parliament’s spending watchdog, found “serious weaknesses” in Defra’s administration, particularly due to a backlog of 63 reviews of existing environmental regulations.
The committee said that while Defra argued that fully transforming its digital systems could save up to £25mn a year, the department had received only 58 per cent of the funding it bid for in the 2021 spending review.
Ruth Chambers, of the Greener UK coalition, which represents 10 of the UK largest conservation groups including the RSPB and the National Trust, said the government would struggle to deliver on key projects, such as farming reform, without adequate IT in place.
“Defra has been running underpowered for too long. No 10 needs to give Defra the funding and support it needs to deliver the big green pledges it’s made,” she added.
Defra said it had made significant progress on investing in its digital services, delivering improvements in flood warnings, farming and countryside schemes, and the processing of food imports and exports.
“Defra is a wide-reaching organisation, and we are committed to improving the quality and availability of our digital services and ensuring our systems are secure and resilient,” it added.
