Quango gives £100k of contracts to firm run by its own boss

CONTRACTS awarded by an enterprise agency to a company run by its own chairman are to be investigated.

Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE) is carrying out an internal audit relating to work given to Rocket Science, an Edinburgh-based consultancy firm run by William Roe.

A copy of its report will be sent to Audit Scotland.

The firm recently had to repay an 8,000 consultancy fee to HIE following claims it had plagiarised information on a report on skills utilisation. HIE is now reviewing all reports from the firm to discover whether the error was a one-off or not.

The agency has awarded 15 contracts to Rocket Science since 2005, totalling about 103,000.

A HIE spokeswoman said yesterday: "As soon as plagiarism of the skills utilisation study was identified, Rocket Science notified HIE and refunded our fee.

"In the light of this, our head of internal audit and compliance is now reviewing all previous reports submitted to HIE from Rocket Science to ascertain whether the example recently publicised is a one-off occurrence. Our audit of Rocket Science reports should be completed by the end of May."

She said there are no conditions which prohibit companies owned by members of the boards of non-departmental public bodies such as HIE from securing contracts, as long as they adhere to regulations.

HIE said previously that conflict of interest procedures were enforced and all contracts to the company followed proper procurement procedures.

Audit Scotland says it is aware of the HIE internal investigation and will look at the completed report.

Mary Scanlon, a Highlands and Islands Conservative MSP, says she is delighted HIE is carrying out an internal review.

She added: "It's not for me to call for Willie Roe to resign, but I think at the point he becomes an embarrassment to an excellent organisation like HIE, he needs to question his future."

Mr Roe is chairman of Rocket Science which was set up in 2001 and has offices in Edinburgh, Newcastle and London.

The firm's clients include the Scottish Government, NHS Scotland, Glasgow City Council, the Department for Work and Pensions, the Big Lottery Fund, the London Development Agency, East of England Development Agency, One NorthEast and Newcastle City Council.

This year it has been commissioned by West London Working for initiatives across the six West London boroughs and a project for Audit Scotland on best practice approaches for public consultation.

The HIE contracts included preparing a tender to deliver the Big Lottery Fund's Growing Community Assets programme and analysis of best practice following a defence base closure or scale-down. They ranged in value from 666 to 26,085.

The agency applied what is called negotiated procedure or selective competitive tendering when awarding the contracts.

Negotiated procedure is used when the value of the goods or services is low, normally less than 10,000, there is evidence that only one supplier has the required products/skills, the proposed supplier has unique products/skills and, through competitive tender, has recently been awarded a similar contract, or where services have previously been supplied and a small additional amount, to the same specification, is required.

Selective competitive tendering is used when tenders are invited from a limited number of contractors for contracts betweeen 10,000 and 50,000.