Close to £400,000 has been “raided” from funding promised to rural businesses in the borough just days before letters of offer were due to go out.
And ABC Council is now to write to DAERA Minister Andrew Muir demanding his department sticks to its word and “honours” its original agreement.
The Rural Business Development Grant Scheme provides support of up to £7,500 to “assist the development, recovery and sustainability of eligible rural micro-businesses employing fewer than 10 people”.
The programme was launched at the end of June and, in just one month, 515 local businesses applied for their share of the available funding.
Successful applicants are due to receive their letters of offer tomorrow (Thursday).
But it has now been revealed that DAERA has reneged on its original offer of funding, with a serious cut to the money originally pledged.
And it only informed council of its decision on Friday – just six days before businesses locally were to be told whether or not they had been successful.
An outraged SDLP Councillor Thomas O’Hanlon branded DAERA’s actions as “scandalous”.
It was DUP Councillor Kyle Savage – chairing the economic and development committee on Tuesday – who had passed comment on the increase in the number of applications to the programme, from 164 in 2025 to 515 this year.
This, however, he said, puts “additional pressure on the budget” and he suggested writing to DAERA to seek more funding as council “doesn’t want to see businesses disappointed”.
Councillor O’Hanlon said the increase in applicants “shows the demand and the need for the support for rural businesses” and enquired about the original budget and the actual money allocated to the programme.
It was enterprise development manager Sarah Jane Macdonald who informed the committee of the 11th hour cut to the available cash.
“Our original allocation from DAERA was £1.38m and we were updated on Friday past that our allocation has reduced to £995,000, in that region, so that results in a substantially less budget for a very highly competitive programme,” she said.
“We have gone through the scoring, as outlined in the DAERA guidance, and all 515 applications have been assessed and scored; 426 applications have passed the 65 pass rate, which is outstanding, and which really points to the quality of the applications we’re receiving and the highly competitive nature of the scheme.”
Ms Macdonald explained that the applicants are due to be informed on Thursday, October 15, whether or not they had been successful.
The update did not sit well with an incredulous Councillor O’Hanlon, who said the figures told him that “the Department is short changing 46 businesses in this area if you were going to the maximum of £7,500 of a grant”.
And he went on: “Whatever the Department has done to raid the rural development budget, by moving it from £1.3m down to just under £1m, I think that’s scandalous, and I think we need to be highlighting that, that we need to at least be funded to the original letter of offer, because that’s an anticipation that our officers have worked on.”
He paid tribute to those same officers for the “mammoth task” which they had undertaken in processing 515 applications, compared to in excess of 100 last year.
Councillor O’Hanlon also hit out at the short timing of the notification of an updated allocation from DAERA, coming, as it did, just six days before the letters of offer were due to go out.
He said there were “serious questions there that need to be asked” and he felt that – having seconded the proposal to write to DAERA Minister Andrew Muir – council should be highlighting the “need for the minimum of that original £1.3m to be honoured”.
