Defra Doubles Contract Value For Cloud And DC Services

The UK's government department for agriculture and the countryside has upped the potential contract value on offer for cloud and datacenter hosting by more than £100 million.

In a procurement notice published late last week, the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs said it was looking for suppliers to provide a range of datacenter and cloud services set to be worth up to £245.5 million ($330 million).

The department has launched the competition among suppliers to provide datacenter facilities management, cloud hosting services, IaaS, and PaaS among other services to the groups under its umbrella, including, crucially, the Rural Payments Agency, which has been the subject of criticism owing to the poor performance of its legacy applications.

The deal will be for five years, with two one-year extension options. It is expected to start in August next year.

In August last year, Defra kicked off a conversation with suppliers under the auspices of a prior information notice (PIN), which said it was looking tech vendors to provide datacenter and cloud services and set the likely value of the deal at £128.1 million ($172 million).

The Register has asked Defra why there has been an increase in the likely contract value and whether the procurement has been delayed.

The PIN said the winner of the datacenter and cloud service deal would support the hosting related to the review and strategy involving migration away from legacy applications, although application-related services are contracted separately.

In August last year, Defra offered up £27 million ($36 million) to keep its controversial legacy farm payments systems running for another three years as it develops a replacement. The Rural Payments Agency – an executive agency sponsored by Defra – pays more than £2 billion ($2.7 billion) annually to support more than 90,000 farmers.

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Numerous reports have slammed the RPA's performance. In 2016, Parliament's spending watchdog, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), found that "payments to farmers have been delayed at a time when their cash flow is already stretched."

Since 2012, Defra has led the Common Agricultural Policy Delivery Programme, together with its delivery bodies, the RPA and the Government Digital Service, to develop a single IT solution for new EU regulations that came into force in 2014, two years before the UK opted to leave the trading and political bloc.

In January 2023, Defra said it was "confident" it was managing the risk related to the fact that 30 percent of its applications were out of vendor support. The nation's National Audit Office wasn't impressed, calling it an issue of "significant concern" because of the scale of Defra's legacy IT systems. ®