Finance Committee, 25 Apr 2000

Meeting date: Tuesday, April 25, 2000

Official Report 224KB pdf

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European Funding Inquiry

The fourth item on the agenda is the European funding inquiry. Members will be aware that the Parliamentary Bureau decided that the European Committee would be the lead committee for the inquiry. Subsequently, at the request of the Parliamentary Bureau, I had discussions with the convener of the European Committee, the Minister for Finance and one of his officials. Agreement has been reached on the committees' respective remits. I believe that I am right in saying that members have not yet had notification of the wording of the aspect to be considered by the Finance Committee. Our remit is to consider what practices and conventions the Treasury applies in allocating Scotland's share of European funds and whether those are appropriate. We will therefore consider the financial management aspects of European funding. The relationship between the Treasury and the European Commission is not part of our remit.

There is no restriction on how we do our work and how we fit in with the European Committee. We can produce our own report or feed into what the European Committee does. We need to consider that and then decide from whom we might want to take evidence as part of the inquiry.

It would be helpful, convener, if you could e-mail members the wording of the remit and some information on the background to your discussions with the Parliamentary Bureau and the other committee convener so that we can get a better handle on where you are coming from.

I will do that and we will consider the matter again next week.

If there is to be a paper next week, it would be helpful to have greater detail about how we should tackle the remit, which is rather general.

Fine. At that stage we will consider from whom we want to take evidence. We will push back the agenda item to next week's meeting.