Thank you, convener—I will try to be brief.
I remind the committee that the new common agricultural policy that is to be implemented next year is radically different from the existing policy. The futures programme that we are discussing today will give us a new system that will ensure the safe delivery of nearly £4 billion of support to our farming, food and rural affairs sectors in the next five years, and which will have a life well beyond that.
The new system, along with necessary and desirable business changes, forms a challenging and complex programme. We had to make many of the changes as a result of the European Union’s requirements, and we knew that we would be doing so against a very tight timetable. For that reason, the futures programme has been fully within the sight of senior management in the Scottish Government and our ministerial team right from its early stages. Information technology is only part of the programme, but sound IT systems are required as a qualification for EU funding. The systems themselves, and not just the payments, need to meet the EU auditors’ tough requirements.
One of the issues that the Auditor General for Scotland reported to the committee is the increase in the cost of the programme from the estimate in the original business case to the estimate in the current business case. That is related predominantly to IT development; the other cost estimates that we made are much closer to the original ones. When we agreed the initial business case in 2012, we did not know the details of the new schemes, nor did we foresee the complexity of the system that we would need to build.
The EU promised us a more simple CAP, whereas we will in fact have the most complex CAP ever, as I believe the new European Commissioner for Agriculture and Rural Development has acknowledged. It is therefore not surprising that we have had to keep our business case under constant review and to amend it substantially.
The second issue that the Auditor General raised relates to independent assurance. The programme benefited from new procedures that were put in place following Audit Scotland’s 2012 report, “Managing ICT contracts”. Our information systems investment board used the Audit Scotland checklist when it considered the programme in 2012, and the programme has been subject to gateway reviews and regularly reported on to our audit committees.
The gateway reviews flagged a number of themes, some of which we had already identified. For example, we went out to recruitment for additional resources last year—we did not have those staff in place by the time of the May review, but we do now. We also recognised that there were issues with governance and planning. Again, those were not helped by the delay in the programmes being tied down by the EU.
In June, I asked for a rapid support team to be put in place to work with the programme’s management to address the issues that were raised. That has been successful. We have completed a further gateway review in the last couple of weeks, which records that we have made great progress and that we are in a much stronger position to tackle the challenges.
In terms of progress, the programme has moved on from the section 22 report. We have completed user acceptance testing of the first major piece of software, and the final part of that has now been integrated and is in testing. It is all running on our new IT environment, which will give the programme a solid underpinning.
We plan for the portal to go live to customers next month. At that point, we will be at a critical phase in the programme. The remaining releases of the software, which will develop the functionality, will sit on that platform and be fed out at regular stages next year.
We have a clear plan in place and it is being followed. We now also have an excellent team in place, and we are working well with our IT partner, which is giving us support at the highest level in the company.
The one thing that we do not have is spare time. That was always a challenge, and it remains so, but I assure the committee that the programme is an absolute priority for me as the accountable officer and for our cabinet secretaries, and it will remain so until it is completed.