European and External Relations Committee, 05 Sep 2006
Meeting date: Tuesday, September 5, 2006
Official Report
285KB pdf
Structural Funds 2007-13 Inquiry
Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the 11th meeting this year of the European and External Relations Committee. This is the committee's first meeting since the summer recess. If you managed to get away on holiday, I hope that you had a wonderful time.
Members will be aware that the committee had a change of clerk during the summer recess; on behalf of the committee, I welcome Jim Johnston.
No apologies have been received. I hope that Dennis Canavan and Charlie Gordon, who are attending other committee meetings, will be able to attend this meeting later.
Agenda item 1 is consideration of the Scottish Executive's response to the committee's report on its inquiry into the Scottish Executive's plans for future structural funds programmes for 2007-13. The response was received during the recess. Members may remember that we submitted a bid to the Conveners Group for time in the chamber to debate the report. That bid will be considered at the Conveners Group meeting on 21 September.
I am sure that there must be loads of comments on the Executive's response.
I want to make a small comment. I refer to paragraph 19 of the response in paper EU/S2/06/11/1. The committee asked the Scottish Executive to say whether it intended to reprioritise other budgets as a result of shortfalls in funding for economic infrastructure and tourism-related projects. The Executive has given some figures and explained what the process will be. We should acknowledge what it has told us, but it would also be useful to ask to be kept updated on the issue so that we can keep an eye on it.
Another point is that, as paragraph 21 of the response states, the committee recommended
"that the Scottish Executive continues to work very closely with the UK Government to ensure that Scotland receives the maximum amount of Structural Funds possible."
We have received the expected response—I did not think that we would get any more—but the Executive says that it expects the matter to be resolved before the autumn. I am not sure how we class autumn in Scotland now, but we are pretty damn close to it. It would be useful to find out from the Executive what that timescale means and whether it can give us any further information on the matter.
In the main, the Executive's response is a useful contribution to our deliberations on the issue. The Executive agrees with most of what we said. We mentioned the importance of looking ahead. In paragraph 15 of the response, the Executive states that it
"has been encouraging partners to prepare exit plans for existing projects where appropriate."
I hope that that work is advanced, because we all have fears about the impact on the voluntary sector. Forward planning will be important in dealing with the changes. In the main, there is a great deal of complementarity between the Executive's views and the points that we raised in our report.
It is crucial that we keep a watching brief on that work—we owe that to those who gave evidence to the committee and did so very well. I hope that we will have regular reports back to the committee on the matter.
When we took evidence in the inquiry, one of my bugbears was the transitional period, which is mentioned in paragraph 14. Perhaps it is just the wording of that paragraph, but I am worried that there is a wee bit of backtracking going on, away from the strident position that the Deputy Minister for Enterprise and Lifelong Learning took when he gave evidence. He was in no doubt then that the new programmes would start on time, but it now seems as though doubt is creeping in. That is not necessarily all down to the Executive—external factors are also involved. We should monitor that, too, because people from throughout the sector who gave evidence raised concern about the issue.
As there are no more comments, I thank the Executive for its response. We will continue to consider the issue.