Sign in / up

back to article Defra gifts £22m to payments quango

An answer sneaked out in the last days before parliament’s summer recess raises questions as to just what the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) is spending its ICT budget on. Because alongside a few tens of thousands spent on IT for sustainable development and animal health, and a slightly more …

COMMENTS

House rules Send corrections
This topic is closed for new posts.
  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Natural England

    Do a useful service - the agricultaral rebates have changed from over production (butter mountains etc) to paying farmers for countryside stewardship, the ELS and HLS schemes. It's EU money that they allocate. They are getting hit for huge budget cuts as well.

    they advise on best practice for wildlife habitats etc to get them into the schemes so thy are helping protect the countryside as you see it. Unless you want rolling great plains of arable everywhere.

    yeah, I know someone who works for them.

    2 0
  2. ShaggyDoggy

    Gifts ?

    YUK

    gives

    please

    0 0
  3. Is it me?

    Lots of odd things get covered in ICT budgets

    If you only think of ICT being about servers, PCs, Networks and the odd application, then sometimes its hard to see why big sums come up. It's worth looking in more detail, at what an Agency or Quango does, before commenting, but it is quite possible that vehicles and remote sensing devices get included in the ICT budget, so if Rural England runs a fleet of vehicles to monitor the health of the environment, then they will come under the ICT budget, because they are packed full of expensive bits of kit.

    So perhaps our valient Reg journo should dig a little deeper, on behalf of those of us who don't have the time, and they could also do a bit of balanced reporting and dig into how much it costs to run a desktop for a year, or a server, against the total budget and size of the organisation. I suspect that £40m is not as much as you think it is.

    0 0
    1. Jane Fae
      Reply Icon

      £40m isnot that much?

      Perhas it isn't. That much, that is. But it would be nice to be able to have some detail to work with.

      Before i took up the pen again - oh, ok, keyboard - i spent some twenty years building and managing fairly chunky databases for some equally chunky organisations. I certainly have come across this sort of cost level elsewhere...most notably in a government department that appeared to believe that an £1100 call-out charge for pc support at the weekend was OK.

      But to be honest the issue here is NOT the cost, so much as the accountability. This is not a Natural England system...because if it was, there would be pressure on them to manage down costs. It isn't exactly a DEFRA system, because they just shell out money and get it straight back.

      In short, there is nothing in the system to encourage anyone to shift costs downward and the hands-off arrangement makes finding out stuff doubly difficult.

      0 0
  4. Vladimir Plouzhnikov

    From Genesis to Revelations

    But of course not all the money goes back to DEFRA. I'm sure a hefty commission gets deposited on the quango's accounts (as is intended, of course) that feeds a DEFRA head's nephew/some labour supporter/another quango/whatever - follow that commission traces and you will find out who was behind the whole scheme and for what end.

    1 0
    1. dave 151
      Reply Icon

      more likely

      a health chunk of cash ends up in the pocket of some consultants and/or suppliers that Natural England are required to use under the terms of a PFI or PPI contract, as happens in the NHS.

      0 0
  5. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    "a complex mapping system"?

    That means it's half imaginary, right?

    Much like me coat, yes, with the imaginary parcels of cash in the pockets. That's the one, thanks.

    1 0
  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Natural England - Confused? Of course

    I am amused to see that well-informed Brits are just as confused about Natural England as us Yanks who pop over for visits. The explanation is simple. While your former colony has had the same government agencies running national parks and forests since the 19th century, your various governments have been reorganizing this every few years. Natural England is what they are calling it this year - quangofied, with new and improved happy environmental do-goodism.

    Thanks to Anonymous Coward for the explanation of this program -- an explanation prominently missing the the article. Come on now, guys, is it that hard to find this stuff?

    0 0
  7. mittfh
    Joke

    Recycling in action!

    Look ma, a green organisation! They even recycle their money!

    "So Defra hands Natural England an appropriate sum of money – believed to be around £22m in the current year – and Natural England hands it straight back."

    0 0
  8. Stern Fenster
    Headmaster

    "is genuinely conducive to good governance"

    Side issue: anyone know what "governance" actually signifies? Presumably it's about governing, and I know two meanings for that word. One is what governments do, and we're only talking about managers so it can't be that. The other is the mechanical meaning, where a few bits of mutually-opposed deadweight spin round with a great fuss on top of the machinery and prevent it working as fast as it otherwise would, and obviously that can't apply to managers either.

    A local NHS trust hereabouts has an "Information Governance Manager". You could substitute "control" for "governance", but it's still a tautology and achieves nothing that "Information Manager" doesn't do on its own.

    Surely, "governance" won't turn out to be yet another word pressed into service to make smalltime bozo management feel bigger? I mean.... that would be dishonest, wouldn't it?

    Oh, and Natural England used to be English Nature, if that helps anyone. They recently advised me how to stop badgers digging into my graveyard (I live in an old church) and bowling skulls out into the field - worried passers-by kept calling the police. Gotta be worth millions.

    0 0
    1. frank 3
      Reply Icon
      Boffin

      good vs. bad governance

      Thank you wikipaedophile, repository of truthiness for defining it as:

      Governance - the activity of governing. It relates to decisions that define expectations, grant power, or verify performance.

      e.g.

      Germany - good governance

      Zimbabwe - bad governance.

      Ugly word, but useful. Not new either. Been around for at least as long as I have been aware of it (15 years+)

      Carry orn.

      0 0
  9. Matt Finish
    Welcome

    Money well spent, I say...

    ... because they took obscure beasties with tricky latin names and made them a whole lot more sexy, with names like the Skeetle, the Pixie gowns and Witches’ whiskers lichens and the queen's Executioner beetle.

    http://www.naturalengland.org.uk/about_us/news/2010/170710.aspx

    0 0
  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Some of where it goes

    IBM have the desktop part of the ICT contract with Natural England, that's where the "unspecified" amount goes to. The support of Genesis is split amongst other suppliers who do the hosting and application support, approx £8m of this is from the £22m budget. Genesis itself is extremely complicated and probably why it costs so much to support....

    1 0
  11. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    IMHO

    Having worked for a few Sirhumphreys in my time (MoD, DoH, old DTI) I can say that the (admittedly tiny) parts of DEFRA I've come in contact with are actually pretty good. They tend to know foo-call about IT systems, but they do acknowledge that and give you freedom to do a job they way you recommend. It's when you get control-freak interference from a less-than-informed client that things start to go wrong - something the DTi were particularly good at.

    DEFRA are also not shy about pruning projects that are showing signs of spiralling out of control - something that, for example, the NHS could learn from.

    0 0
This topic is closed for new posts.

Other stories you might like