Hi, I’m Kieran, a Programme Delivery Manager in Defra’s Digital, Data, Technology and Security (DDTS) function. I’ve been working primarily in the Farming Delivery Group over the last two years, supporting teams in delivering essential services for farmers and land managers.
More recently I’ve been working on a project that aimed to help Rural Payments Agency (RPA) colleagues to help their customers more quickly and confidently.
Back in 2023, colleagues in RPA identified a clear problem affecting both customer and colleague experience. Call centre agents were spending valuable time moving between different systems to answer customer queries.
RPA engaged DDTS to help turn that problem into a solution: one that brought the right information together in one place and made it easier for colleagues to help customers quickly and confidently.
Building Consolidated View with RPA
Since then, we developed Consolidated View (CV) to address this issue. CV brings together data from several source systems - Rural Payments Portal, Siti Agri and the Land Management System - into clearly defined tabs within the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) space.
Colleagues can quickly see information, such as authentication questions, business and contact details, and land information.
For us in DDTS, the challenge was to make that data useful, reliable and easy to access, while keeping the experience familiar for colleagues already using CRM.
CV first launched to call centre agents in November 2024 and has since been rolled out to more than 1,400 users across RPA’s Service Delivery function. As the product grew, we continued to work with RPA colleagues to improve the service by iterating on the user interface, enhancing the product’s performance, and introducing new data sources and information in priority order.
Listening, learning, and improving
One of the most important parts of the delivery was listening to colleagues throughout. We used surveys, demos and regular conversations to understand how CV was being used and where it could be improved. That feedback helped us make enhancements while balancing the technical constraints of the application and keeping the experience consistent for users.
For an external user calling RPA, CV is not a visible product they would know is there, so feedback from customers has understandably been limited.
However, feedback from our internal users has been progressively more positive, with colleagues describing the product as “intuitive” and “efficient”. We hope this is reflected in the external customer experience too, through quicker, smoother calls.
Understanding the impact for colleagues and customers
From the most recent survey date we have, in November 2025, out of 163 responses, 75% of respondents said CV saves them time, with an average saving of 2 minutes and 42 seconds per call or task.
Across the 1,400 users Consolidated View will support, and the thousands of calls and queries managed by those users, this relatively small time saving starts to add up quickly. It represents a real and tangible efficiency saving for RPA and an opportunity to improve the call experience for customers.
Delivering through partnership
This was a collaborative delivery between RPA, DDTS and some of our industry partners. RPA brought the operational knowledge and understanding of colleague needs; DDTS brought the delivery and technical capability to make CV a reality, working closely with our suppliers - Equal Experts and esynergy - to design, build, test, launch and iterate Consolidated View.
The project was not without its challenges and required careful navigation of an extremely complex series of datasets, source systems and business processes. Despite this, the team delivered a much-needed solution for RPA and learned a lot about farm and land data along the way.
What’s next for Consolidated View?
2nd June 2026 marked the end of more than two years of delivery effort and the start of CV moving into a steady business-as-usual state, having delivered its final release covering payment data and performance improvements.
The Consolidated View team will now reset its focus and move towards establishing the Farming Data Service, which covers an essential set of core data capabilities required to support Defra’s and RPA’s key digital transformation objectives for farming. Consolidated View won’t be going far though, as it represents the first in a growing list of customers for this emerging data capability.
In the noise of everything we are delivering across Defra, CV itself is a relatively imperceptible and small piece of the puzzle. For me, though, it’s an outstanding example of how we can come together, cross-organisationally and cross-functionally, to invest in something that unlocks so much value. As for me and the team, we are excited to see what we can deliver next.
More information
Kieran Lewis is a Programme Delivery Manager in Defra’s Digital, Data, Technology and Security function.
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