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Restoring ‘confidence’ in IPAFFS by improving observability, stability and predictability
As the processing system that controls £50 billion worth of SPS – sanitary (human and animal health) and phytosanitary (plant health) – imports annually, it’s no exaggeration to say the Import of Products, Animals, Food and Feed System (IPAFFS) is a critical part of the UK’s border infrastructure. Sitting at the intersection of national trade and biosecurity, it links the movement of SPS goods to HMRC customs declarations – via the Border Trade Matching Service (BTMS) – and ensures the relevant veterinary and health compliance checks are carried out, so we are protected against pests and disease.
However, as IPAFFS was built quickly to meet the demands of our EU Exit, a large number of features have had to be added over the past few years, alongside mounting technical debt. This came to a head in July 2025 when it became clear that every release resulted in a serious incident and a level of system downtime, with a massive loss of confidence among key stakeholders. Each failure led to challenging and time consuming fixes, often with unforeseen impacts. These compounded the delays and problems at borders, with our biosecurity compromised and the reputation of Defra severely dented.
To rectify this problem, a dedicated Equal Experts IPAFFS team, within Defra’s Trade Delivery Group, made significant but incremental improvements over the course of more than a year – with support from Defra’s newly formed DDTS Trade team, who provided the backing and space to work the rectification plan. Systematically overcoming a series of complex challenges, the team stabilised the service and returned it to a place where it can be responsive to continually evolving technological – and business – needs. This series of measures has strengthened IPAFFS so it can ensure the biosecurity of the nation, whilst also keeping pace with changing policy and operational requirements from Defra and beyond.
Outcomes
From ‘unreleasable’
to a regular two-week release cycle with 0 priority incidents
A 36% smaller team
with improved deployment speed, automation, observability, security and stability
Releases down to 11 minutes from over 6 hours
this is a significant cost reduction for software releases alongside the reduced team size
About Defra
Industry
Government & Public Sector
Organisation Size
13,000
Location
UK
Project Length
14 months
Challenge
Coming to terms with complicated coding that could cause crises
Despite the critical nature of the service in monitoring imports of live animals, animal products, plants, and high-risk foods into the UK, IPAFFS was plagued by a range of issues, such as technical debt, and a lack of database management. As a result, updates had become convoluted and time-consuming, requiring significant downtime and putting the system at risk of failure. Integration with HMRC’s Customs Declarations Service (CDS) provided another layer of complexity, and Defra has hit headlines in the past when interconnecting system outages have prevented staff at borders from processing consignments, resulting in serious and costly delays to shipments of goods with already short shelf-lives.
As these problems accumulated, the system became ‘unreleasable’ in July 2025, meaning that updates were not possible. In a world of constantly changing and advancing technology, such a situation is untenable, especially for a system of such complexity. Having transitioned IPAFFS from the previous supplier a few months earlier, Equal Experts faced the challenge of returning the service to a state where it could continually meet critical infrastructure needs, and confidence could be restored in the eyes of the customer.
Solution
Introducing observability to make incremental improvements to indexing
The first issue to address was making sense of IPAFFS’s underlying data, which had become a mess as a result of a lack of database management over many years. Creating observability tools within the system identified problems with how data was being ingested from the supporting databases, and the introduction of a dedicated database administrator sped up response times of queries. Incremental improvements added much-needed stability in the system, and it was returned to a ‘releasable’ and stable state in January 2026. As well as facilitating proper system monitoring for the first time, a much-needed update brought with it a host of features including improved risking capabilities and vulnerability improvements. From there, subsequent releases were issued within three weeks of each other, and the team is now working to a regular two-week release cycle.
Meanwhile, it was the predecessor to the BTMS that hit headlines for its outage halting customs clearance of fresh imports, due to inefficient querying mechanisms. Equal Experts worked to replace the legacy system with the faster-running BTMS which has removed these burdensome data loads from IPAFFS, contributing to greater stability across the border ecosystem.
Furthermore, over the summer of 2026, the expiration of IPAFFS’s specialist deployment tool presented the team with the opportunity to move the service to its own delivery pipeline, thus dramatically improving the stability and resilience of the service, and paving the way for faster, safer and more predictable releases with far less manual intervention and operational effort. Defra stakeholders have commented on a “step-change in architectural design and delivery” and commended the team for “consistently… going above and beyond expectations… helping shape delivery and helping Policy… to see ‘digital’ in a different light.”
Results
Restoring faith in a critical service that now boasts the underlying technology needed to keep the UK’s borders safe
From a place of “little confidence” in a service that was ill-equipped to deal with the nation’s border biosecurity demands, to where the team has brought IPAFFS today is a journey that is nothing short of transformational. Putting a delivery process in place such that a regular release cycle is possible – whilst overcoming historical issues with governance that prevented quick responses to problems – is one thing; but this project went beyond the technical improvements. Rebuilding faith in this critical system has been possible thanks to a partnership with Defra based on trust, while the results speak for themselves; improvements made to automation, data management, regulatory compliance, financial oversight, and technical debt, as well as updates to the Java technology on which IPAFFS is built.
Better observability and transparency provide clearer insight into what is running, how the service is performing and where problems might occur. A higher level of automation reduces operational overheads and the reliance on fragile legacy processes. And IPAFFS now boasts a faster and simpler route to production, with safer and more reliable deployments – all with zero high priority issues to date – and quicker resolution in the event of any issues. This has also dramatically improved the time it takes to make technical changes from several months to within one week, and future-proofed the system against changes for the EU Delivery Programme and post-Brexit trade agreements.
Alongside this, updates to interconnecting systems no longer place a burden on IPAFFS and customs declarations are assessed against complex risk rules in mere milliseconds. As a result, the UK’s borders are now supported by a stable and resilient, protective service, with an underlying system that ensures that goods that need to be cleared quickly are cleared quickly; that high-risk goods that need to be inspected are inspected; and that dangerous goods that need to be caught are caught.