Scottish Government Reports
Agenda item 2 is consideration of three reports from the Scottish Government. One is on European funding, one is on the transposition of EU directives, and one is on horizon 2020. Do members have any comments or questions?
It is helpful that we have been given such detailed information, particularly on the funding. We perhaps need to put pressure on the Scottish Government and the Westminster Government. I have not sat down and worked out a detailed calculation, but from a rough calculation based on what is in the papers I estimate that more than €800 billion is available from the EU budget, yet the Scottish drawdown is something less than €5 billion. I am sure that, if people were galvanised, focused and brought together at the Westminster and Scottish levels to work on the issue, we could do a whole lot better than that. The current situation strikes me as lamentable when all that money is available.
Let us take, for example, the Comenius programme moneys that we considered in our languages inquiry. In the course of that inquiry, we discovered that teachers have never heard of or seen any publicity about the funding that is available. I am certain that other funding is available for students, commerce and industry across Scotland, but people are just not being made aware of it. Everybody in Scotland and the United Kingdom must work a whole lot harder on the issue of the funding that is there to be spent. We might discover, through the efforts of Willie Coffey, me and others, that the €28 billion for broadband has not been spent. If that is the case, it is because all of us are not working hard enough on the issue.
We really must examine the situation under a microscope and put ministers at the Scottish Government and Westminster levels, as well as our parliamentarians in the European Parliament, under pressure to make much more publicly accessible the information about what funding is available for everybody to draw down. We need to get people together and ensure that academics, commerce and our industry groups are homing in on the funding issues.
I could not agree more. We could do more to include in our inquiries and reports some thread on the European funding that is available.
It comes back to our original report, in which we suggested that there should be a strategic central funding agency or organisation to do that type of work. It would do the donkey work in the background—the real hard slog of identifying funds and seeing where they matched—and would also do some of the public relations work to advertise the funding. The Comenius programme is a perfect example of that. How can we ensure that every teacher in Scotland knows about the opportunities that exist for them to use the Comenius programme for their personal and professional development?
Absolutely.
The phrase
“information not held by Scottish Government”
sometimes appears in a column in the table on European funding. Is that because the Scottish Government is not really involved in some of the issues? I had not even heard of some of the funds, such as the Hercule II programme, which aims
“to enhance cooperation in the fight against fraud”.
What on earth is it? Is nothing in Scotland eligible for funding from that programme? I am not criticising the table, because it gives us a lot more information than we would otherwise have, but it tells only part of the story.
Part of the problem is that some of the projects are cross-border ones, so the information is not centrally held here; it is held at Westminster level. We should maybe look into that issue. For some programmes the drawdown of funding is for reserved matters, such as energy. In those cases there is maybe a UK-wide funding settlement rather than specific funding for Scotland.
I picked the Hercule II programme because Scotland obviously has a separate legal system and the term “fraud” implies that there is some element of criminality.
Roderick Campbell is right. There is also the trans-European networks for transport and the Marco Polo programme. We drew down funding from the Marco Polo programme when the Rosyth to Zeebrugge ferry route was being developed.
I am concerned about the trans-European networks for transport. Five or 10 years ago, I asked the Scottish Government to what extent we were using those funds to develop road networks such as the new Forth crossing. As far as I am aware, we did not draw down a penny from Europe for that project. We might have been eligible, because at one stage that route was a trans-European network route. We have to pile on the pressure and say that that is just not good enough.
The report on funding is a working document. The first draft that we received did not have as much information as the current draft. The clerks consistently go back to seek clarification and updates. I hope that as time goes on the table will be populated with much more information. We should take up the points that members have raised and see whether we can get some additional information on those.
The Scottish Government has agreed to come back to us with an updated table every six months or so. That will allow us to see where the gaps are and whether we can find information to fill them.
I compliment the committee clerks and Government officials, who have done a lot of work on the table. The document is crucial. Everyone must value it and appreciate that, as you say, there is a whole lot more work for us to do on it.
Convener, can you help to clarify exactly what some of the information in the table means? For example, if there is no drawdown by the UK, does that mean that Scotland can therefore not draw down its portion of that fund? I draw members’ attention to the European globalisation adjustment fund, which is listed in the middle of page 9 of the table. It is a €500 million fund
“to provide one-off support to help individuals re-enter employment following redundancy as a result of globalisation”.
You would imagine that there might be an opportunity for the UK to draw down some of that funding, but the table indicates that there is no drawdown by the UK and no drawdown by the Scottish Government. If the UK does not draw down any funds, can we still apply to draw down funding for Scotland? I doubt that.
The information in one column in the table suggests that
“Applications for funding are made by Member State Governments”.
In the example that I mentioned, are we in the UK missing a trick when it comes to instigating applications to draw down funding?
Secondly, when there is a drawdown allocation in the table, I presume that that is our allocation or fair portion of the drawdown. The amount that is shown is not an indication of failure; it is Scotland’s allocation from the total drawdown. Helen Eadie is correct to point out that, when there is no drawdown by the UK, we should be alerting our colleagues in the Westminster Parliament to act on those matters.
09:30
We could do that later this morning, for example.
I have a comment on the European globalisation adjustment fund, which was mentioned in a previous paper by Iain McIver. The paper explained that it would cost the Westminster Government more, pound for pound, to draw down the money than the benefit that we would get from it. That claim merits a bit more investigation, as it is a convenient excuse for Westminster. Recently, there were 1,000 redundancies at Halls of Broxburn. The fund was designed for situations that involved such large-scale redundancies, so millions of pounds could have been drawn down, but the Government’s excuse was that it would have cost more, pound for pound, to do that. That is a spurious excuse, and we should ask the minister about it this morning.
The clerk has just reminded me that we will return to our main focus on EU funding in the autumn. Addressing some of those specific points will allow us to drill down into the whole funding set-up and to find out what is working and what is not and where the gaps are.
Super.
Are there any comments on the other reports from the Scottish Government?
The report on the transposition of EU directives seems to be pretty straightforward. I want to highlight a wee point in the horizon 2020 report. The report on the FP7 programme, which is the predecessor to horizon 2020, suggests that Scotland secured funding of €484 million, which is only 1.5 per cent of FP7. However, in the grand scheme of things, it is 10 per cent of the UK allocation, so proportionately, given our population, we are punching above our weight in that respect.
That demonstrates clearly the work that our universities have done in research and innovation, and builds a good platform for horizon 2020 with regard to considering how it can expand and reach out to business and create economic growth through research and funding mechanisms. I wanted to draw the committee’s attention to that. We have perhaps not been punching above our weight at UK level on some funds, as we have just discussed, but on others we have certainly been leading the way, and I hope that we will continue to do so.
Are members content to move on from the reports? If there are any other points, we can always raise them via correspondence.
Members indicated agreement.