The Rural Payments Agency (RPA), an executive agency sponsored by Defra, has gone out to tender with a major contract for geospatial analytics and remote monitoring services worth up to an estimated £17.75 million.
The RPA is the only accredited paying agency in England and makes payments to farmers, traders and landowners. 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.
The RPA now requires an advanced technological solution capable of streamlining national monitoring processes to overcome these challenges.
The successful supplier will be required to implement a minimum viable product (MVP) within twelve months of the contract start date.
Scope of capabilities required from suppliers to provide the following core functionality for users include:
- 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.
Suppliers will also be required 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. They will also need to provide the option for other Defra Group Bodies and other UK Paying Agencies to utilise the contract.
Initial contract term is 5 years with the option to extend for up to a further 5 years.
Time limit for receipt of tenders or requests to participate is 11 March 2025 – click here to acces the tender documentation.
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