Integrated Administration and Control System (Hansard, 23 April 1996)

§ Sir Dudley Smith
To ask the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food what disciplinary action he is taking against Ministry employees responsible for sending confidential documents relating to other people to integrated administration and control system applicants. [25525]

§ Mr. Boswell
Integrated administration and control system documentation, including field data printouts which contain information about the previous year's application, is sent to applicants by an external contractor. This operation is contracted out, in line with central Government policy, in the interests of efficiency. Any disciplinary action as a result of errors in the 1996 mailing of IACS documentation by the contractor's employees is an internal matter for the contractor.

§ Sir Dudley Smith
To ask the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food what action he is taking to prevent officials sending other people's forms to integrated administration and control system applicants with particular reference to Warwickshire; and what assessment he has made as to how the errors occurred.[25526]

§ Mr. Boswell
About 0.2 per cent. of integrated administration and control system applicants have reported receiving wrongly addressed IACS field data printouts or had field data printouts missing from their IACS package; 18 per cent. of these problems were reported by farmers in Warwickshire representing about 0.04 per cent. of the total mailing. This operation is contracted out in line with central Government policy because its size—some 246,000 A3 original field data printouts and the same number of A4 copies—means that it cannot be handled by the internal resources available 143W within the Ministry. The contractor is one of Europe's largest computing/mailing houses, and has carried out this work for the past three years.
As a result of the problems reported by farmers, the external contractor responsible for producing the field data printouts and mailing them with the IACS documentation for 1996 carried out a detailed investigation. It was concluded that the mistakes in the mailing arose because of very limited operator error. The contractor for this mailing already operates to International Standards Organisation standards. Nevertheless, we are considering additional measures further to safeguard personalised packages in respect of the next IACS round.