Steve Double, the Member of Parliament for St Austell and Newquay, has refuted claims that the county will be left with less than half of its replacement EU funding after the Government revealed that Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly will receive £132million in funding between 2022 and 2025 via the UK Shared Prosperity Fund (UKSPF).
False claims had been made by opposition leaders in Cornwall, and also widely reported in the media, that had the UK remained part of the EU Cornwall would have received £100m a year in EU funding.
However, the House of Commons Library - an independent, trusted fact-checking body - released data stating that any attempt to estimate how much Cornwall would have received had the UK remained part of the EU would require “so many assumptions as to make the result effectively meaningless”.
Researchers at the House of Commons Library confirmed: “We don’t think it’s possible to meaningfully estimate how much money the UK, or any part of it, would have received if the UK was still in the EU.
“This is because if the UK had not voted to leave the EU, then the EU budget for the 2021-27 framework period - and therefore the EU funding allocations within that budget - would have been made in a very different political environment…attempting to work out what the resulting budget would have looked like therefore requires so many assumptions as to make the result effectively meaningless.”
The data also shows that Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly in fact received an average of just over £50 million per year between 2010 and 2018.
Steve describes it as puzzling that these false claims were not fact-checked, saying: “Over the last week or so we have heard opposition leaders in Cornwall saying that the county should have been getting £100m a year. I have always challenged this figure and asked where it was coming from. My colleagues and I went to the House of Commons Library and they have now provided us with the true figures of what Cornwall has actually been receiving from the EU previously.
“The average is just over £50m, nowhere near the £100m that is being incorrectly reported. It is important that we deal with facts, not wishful thinking or assumptions and projections. It is clear that this Government is resolved to fulfilling its commitment to at least match the average spending of EU structural funds over the previous programme. And let us remember that this is only the first tranche.
“There are also no guarantees of the amount of funding that Cornwall would have received had we remained in the EU. However, the figures we do have show that EU funding was inconsistent. For example, in 2014, Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly received £180m, yet the following year that figure was dramatically less at £13.1 and even less in 2017, receiving £8.7m. It’s also important not to forget that not all of the money was spent either which means the funding was often wasted on projects which have brought no economic benefits to anyone.”
Cornwall now has by far the largest amount of SPF funding per head of anywhere in England, which will be used to directly tackle issues affecting communities unlike EU funding which was often wasted or poorly targeted.
Steve continued: “Cornwall will now have much more say over how this funding is spent based on our own priorities, it will be easier to administer and will be managed by people who know Cornwall best, and what it needs. We need to stick to facts and the fact is that this Government is committed to ensuring that Cornwall can realise its full potential.”
For more information on EU structural funds in Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly visit the link below:
https://cohesiondata.ec.europa.eu/Other/Historic-EU-payments-regionalised-and-modelled/tc55-7ysv