AUDIT COMMITTEE PUBLISHES ITS REPORT ON ABIS

The Scottish Parliament’s powerful Audit Committee today published it report into the Scottish Executive’s handling of the Agricultural Business Improvement Scheme (ABIS), a funding scheme designed to develop and improve income potential in agriculture and maintain rural jobs.

Outlining the main recommendations of the report convener Andrew Welsh said:

"The purpose of our inquiry into ABIS was to establish whether the Executive could have revised the scheme more quickly, why it was unable to respond effectively to the sudden influx of applications and whether it was ill-informed in deciding how to prioritise those applications.

"Whilst the committee understands the difficulties that the Scottish Executive Rural Affairs Department (SERAD) faced in dealing with this scheme - in particular the late upsurge in applications - we do not consider that the administration methods it had in place were as efficient as they could have been.

"SERAD has already accepted that both the quality of monitoring information during the scheme and the time taken to do it was sub-standard, but we are somewhat reassured that steps have been taken to rectify the situation.

"Although ABIS in itself is a relatively small scheme, it is vital that lessons are learned from this episode as SERAD is the lead government body for administering EU funding schemes to the agricultural community in Scotland."

The principal conclusions and recommendations from the report are as follows:

• We trust that following devolution the approval process for making changes to a scheme will be more streamlined than was the case for ABIS.

• We consider it is vital that the Department has in place robust methodology for accurately ascertaining the likely levels of demand for new or revised schemes in the future. We do not think this currently exists and we therefore recommend that the Department re-assesses its current method of operation in this area with a view to adopting more reliable market research systems. This should complement the relationship the Department has with the representative organisations rather than be seen as a substitute for it.

• We note the Auditor General’s view that the Department maintained financial control over the Scheme and bearing in mind the nature of the upsurge in applications this achievement should not be underestimated. We do not consider, however, that this masks the fact that the methods used in administering the Scheme were not as efficient as they could have been.

• We consider that the Department was too reactive in administering ABIS and we endorse the recommendations of the Auditor General that deal with planning and management risk when changes are introduced to grant schemes.

• We are encouraged that the Department has already taken action to introduce a single, linked computer system to produce management information on grant schemes and consider this to be a rudimentary tool for the efficient administration of a dispersed organisation such as the Department.

• It was accepted by our witnesses that both the quality of the monitoring of information and the time taken to do it was sub-standard for at least part of the Scheme. We are reassured that steps have already been taken to rectify the situation and we acknowledge that it should be considerably easier for a consistent application of rules to take place within a networked IT system.

• We welcome the initiative to introduce lead office responsibility for particular schemes as being a sign of the Department’s proactivity in addressing the systemic issue of communication within the Department.

• We intend to return to these issues within an appropriate timescale in order to assess the response of the Department to the issues which have been identified by the Auditor General and by this inquiry.

The full report is available free on the Parliament’s website. Hard copies can be purchased from outlets of the Stationery Office.