MSP hits out as SNP spends over £200 million on IT consultants to administer farm payments

Official figures show that on average more than £20m has been paid out each year to companies to advise and administer agricultural support payments over the last nine years.

The total spend is just over £203m since 2016, the vast majority of which went to three external companies.

Rural Affairs Secretary Mairi Gougeon said the firms are providing IT services rather than simply consulting on how to run the programmes.

But farmers have raised concerns that the current system is not fit for purpose and that forthcoming changes to the payments means the IT could become obsolete.

Jonnie Hall, director of policy at the National Farmers Union of Scotland, said: “It’s a staggering amount of money and our members – farmers and crofters across Scotland – will be gobsmacked by such amounts of money going into consultants’ fees to deliver agricultural support payments.

“And yet the impression that we have about that IT system has been that it was very much a flawed system from day one.

“It has recovered, it has got back on track, but if we’re still paying significant amounts of money to keep it ticking over then that has got to be a concern for all of us.”

Failures in the system led to payments to thousands of farmers being delayed, which led to a damning report in 2017 from Audit Scotland, the financial watchdog.

Holyrood’s Rural Affairs and Islands Committee has heard evidence in recent weeks from the agricultural sector that the IT system is not working for them.

Agriculture Minister Jim Fairlie said that policy was not being driven by the system’s capabilities.

The Scottish Government said that its agriculture and rural economy directorate needs several digital systems to operate and that not all of them are to administer payments. However, it said that the nine years covered by the analysis of the payments including the end of the IT system being built.

It was originally designed to implement European Union Common Agricultural Policy payments before the UK left the bloc in 2020. Officials said that the external firms provide “specific expertise” to support the Scottish government as well as delivering specific requests and fixing technical problems and providing staff to fill short term civil service vacancies.