A TOP civil servant has come under fire for failing to provide evidence of the savings made under Scotland's controversial college merger process.

MSP Tavish Scott, a member of the Scottish Parliament's public audit committee, launched the attack during an evidence session on the financial benefits of reorganisation in the further education sector.

Aileen McKechnie, the Scottish Government's director of advanced learning, told the committee not all the £50 million savings claimed under the merger process could be identified.

An incredulous Mr Scott told her: "You must be familiar with this evidence. This is a core recommendation of Audit Scotland over numerous public sector mergers where this is the latest one where the government cannot justify the figure they asserted would be saved by this process.

"You must be familiar with the evidence the Auditor General gave and you must be able to justify it. Your submission to the committee has no detail on the £50m. Why not?

"Do you not think this is important? Do you not think it is important to justify a figure that was made to parliament about saving on a process that you can't justify?"

Mrs McKechnie told him: "Of course I absolutely think this is important," adding that subsequent written evidence could be provided to the committee on the proposed savings, which she said she expected to be delivered by 2015/16.

She told the committee: "The funding council did provide figures for severance costs and savings both to this committee and to Audit Scotland which.... represents 75% of the total costs.

"The remaining 25% of the costs cover a variety of issues like ICT or marketing, project management or procurement, shared services. Some of that is hard to attribute directly to the merger.

"We have been advised by some colleges that they don't have systems that allow them to directly attribute these costs to the merger process and that is why there isn't a totality of breakdown of the 100% investment in the merger journey."

Earlier, the Conservative MSP Mary Scanlon raised concerns about the setting up of new regional management boards in a number of college areas asking whether they reduced autonomy for colleges.

She said: "Is a regional board really necessary? It's costly, it's bureaucratic, it's time consuming, it takes away autonomy and ten colleges manage very well without it. Is it something we should be looking at abolishing?"

Ms Scanlon also raised concerns about a reduction of more than 25,000 places in ICT courses in the further education sector over the past few years.

Mrs McKechnie told her: "We have looked to reduce those courses that we felt did not deliver an economically valuable output so we have looked to reduce the shorter courses that were five hours or less and that might have been courses that were basic IT skills that we find individuals need less now because ICT is taught right the way through the school system so the demand that might have been there a decade ago for the very basic ICT skills is no longer there."

In April, Audit Scotland warned there was no evidence the major restructuring of colleges had led to wider financial savings or improvements to education.

There have been a raft of mergers in the further education sector since 2011/12 which has seen the number of colleges fall from 37 to 20.

When the plans were announced, the Scottish Government said mergers would deliver £50m of efficiency savings each year from 2015/16 and bring other benefits such as reduced duplication, better engagement with employers and better outcomes for students.

A report by Audit Scotland recognised that savings had come from a significant reduction in the number of teaching staff in colleges.

But it added: "It is unclear what savings have been achieved in addition to reduced staffing costs and what the full costs of the merger process are as there are no systems in place either at individual colleges or centrally to collect this information."

In terms of four college mergers which Audit Scotland looked at in more detail, its report added: "While all colleges undertook an initial analysis of merger costs when developing their business cases, ongoing monitoring of costs and efficiency savings has been limited.

"None of the fieldwork colleges could provide detailed information on merger costs and efficiency savings. Only information on the larger merger costs and efficiency savings, such as voluntary severance payments and reduced staffing costs, were available.

"While this represents three-quarters of the total estimated costs of the mergers, a significant proportion of costs was not separately identified as direct merger costs by individual colleges."