Geospatial analytics and remote monitoring service (GAS)

The Rural Payments Agency (RPA) is an executive agency sponsored by Defra. As the only accredited paying agency in England, the RPA makes payments to farmers, traders and land owners.

The RPA also make payments on behalf of Natural England, and manages over 40 schemes to help ensure England has a healthy rural economy and strong rural communities. Satellite data is business critical for RPA to provide risk assurance in the delivery of the Farming and Countryside Programme (FCP) schemes which use the RPA's Rural Land Register (RLR).

The current compliance monitoring processes for FCP schemes are manual, resource-intensive, inefficient and have high fraud and error rates. They rely on field visits, paperwork, and subjective assessments, leading to delayed evaluations, increased administrative burdens, and only capture a small percentage of the entire population.

To overcome these challenges, RPA requires an advanced technological solution capable of streamlining national monitoring processes. The capabilities required for this contract are summarised below: (a) to implement a minimum viable product (MVP) within twelve months of the contract start date; (b) to provide the following core functionality for users: • to use imagery sources to identify farm habitats; • to monitor land use and cover changes with respect to farming activities; • to extract markers from imagery sources; • to ingest imagery sources and other data from other RPA and Defra Group systems; • to publish outputs to other RPA and Defra Group systems; • to monitor compliance with scheme agreements for a land parcel; and • for users to utilise the Supplier's solution in the field and add their own imagery sources and ground truth data for a land parcel.

(c) to provide product delivery, user-centred services, IT service management, and hosting; (d) to provide the capability to introduce future services, such as integrating additional imagery sources, provisioning additional imagery sources, developing new data products derived from imagery sources, developing new markers, and integrating the Supplier's solution with other RPA and Defra Group systems; and (e) to provide the option for other Defra Group Bodies (https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations#department-fo...) and other UK "Paying Agencies" to utilise the contract. Additional information: The contract value is expected to be up to £9,691,693.27 (net of VAT) during the overall maximum 10-year term (5+2+2+1), which includes the cost of implementation, ongoing operational service charges, contract extensions, contract changes and an allowance for indexing of prices. The contract value is an estimate only and will be dependent upon whether an extension (in part or in whole) is enacted, whether any optional services (in part or in whole) are enacted, the extent of any contract changes, and the indices used to index prices.