The farming and rural directorate has brought in a specialist provider to help its work to deliver ‘a broad range of essential payments and support services to customers across Scotland’
The Scottish Government has awarded a £100m-plus contract for a supplier to support digital upgrades in the delivery of digital services across its Agriculture and Rural Economy directorate.
On 14 April, the ARE directorate entered into a potential seven-year engagement with tech supplier Version 1. The deal is expected to be worth between £60m to £85m but spending, inclusive of VAT, could rise as high as £114m.
According to a recently published commercial notice, the directorate “delivers a broad range of essential payments and support services to rural customers across Scotland [including] a variety of schemes that benefit the rural sector both economically and environmentally”.
The delivery of this support is “totally dependent on digital services and technologies to ensure that claims for subsidies, grants and support under several schemes are delivered in a timely, accurate and compliant way”.
These services are underpinned by a “main Rural Payments and Services Digital Platform [that] is highly complex due to the significant level of accuracy in land measurement and associated actions that it needs to work to”.
This system is “based on a technical architecture that was first defined in 2012”, while “other technologies and services that predate the main platform still form a vital part of the overall solution”.
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The notice indicates that “the primary focus of the purchaser through this contract is the retiral, maintenance and enhancement of the current services, but also extending them and integrating them as appropriate in order to benefit from digital innovations”
Beyond that, ARE identifies a “triple imperative” for awarding the potential nine-figure digital deal.
The first of these is “continuing to modernise and improve the complete technical architecture that underpins the services”, while the second is “continuing to adapt the existing support schemes and introduce new ones that will deliver the desired outcomes” for the rural economy and government’s sustainability and environmental objectives. The final motivation for implementing the agreement with Version 1 is to assist the directorate in “continuing to apply digital thinking and innovation to exploit technologies and provide customer-centred, reliable, secure and cost-effective services”.
“Change cannot be allowed to negatively impact the current business,” the notice adds. “[The] Rural Payments and Inspections Division, from 18 offices throughout Scotland, processes payments of around £600m annually to customers, to the benefit of Scotland’s rural communities and the rural economy. The platform processes 36,000 types of claims per year for about 20,000 customers (representing 46,000 registered businesses) and has well over 99% availability to customers 24/7, 365 days a year. RPID is now making payments quicker than ever before.”
Four firms bid for the deal.
