The value of test and learn in creating new services at Defra

With the UK leaving the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, the Department for Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has embarked on a radical transformation of how it regulates farming and distributes £3.5 billion in agricultural subsidies annually.

Instead of paying England’s 80,000 farmers for their outputs, it will pay them for environmental benefits such as air quality, water quality, biodiversity, and carbon reduction.

The outcome will be a more resilient, profitable and sustainable agricultural sector; but the new approach represents the biggest upheaval in farming policy since the 1970s.

Over many decades, past changes to agricultural subsidies have been associated with big IT system failures and late payments to farmers, leaving many struggling to survive.

To deliver such a radical change, Defra engaged Public Digital as their transformation partner, taking an incremental test-and-learn approach to reforming agricultural subsidies.

Policy makers, the digital teams and the Rural Payments Agency, which operates the service, were not working together in partnership but were being managed as different strands.

There had been efforts to try to build collaborative ways of working, but in a pressured environment with decades of back history, it was hard and had not been sufficient.

With deep, sustained engagement from the leadership of the programme, digital and the RPA, we brought the functions together, creating a joint leadership team, building trust and investing in relationships.

That collaborative, multi-functional leadership meant that new multi-disciplinary teams could be created to establish the shape of the future service and to start delivering work to iterate and test the new service.

We encouraged and amplified the voices that were calling for a radical rethink about farmers’ experience of the service, freeing them from the constraints of the past.

This led to some bold changes. For example, Defra moved away from a service based around annual submission windows followed by long waits for funding notifications, to rolling applications and rapid decisions.

We then helped Defra put out the service as early as possible and start to gather user feedback.

Identifying a thin end-to-end slice of the new service - subsidies for improved soil quality - we helped Defra to launch the initial service to a small number of farmers to rapidly start collecting user feedback.

Upon launch in June 2022, subsidy decisions that once took six months now took 48 hours, reducing the huge financial strain and mental burden that farmers have faced for decades.

And by embracing test-and-learn publicly, Defra could use the feedback to see how the service design and subsidy payment structures worked for farmers.

These feedback loops, shared across the multidisciplinary teams, then let Defra iterate the policy.

Using the learnings from the early tests, in mid-2023 policymakers were able to change and optimise the structure of subsidy payments to better incentivise the right outcomes - all while there were still few enough real users to make it financially and operationally feasible to pivot.