Monday, October 10, 2022
Is inter-government arguing causing Wales to lose out?
Our exit from the EU was aways going to be felt particularly sharply in Wales, if only because of the loss of hundreds of millions of Euros invested in our poorest communities. The fact that this money was not always invested wisely, and that ordinary people did not feel its benefit, almost certainly contributed to the vote in favour of leave in many of those areas. That though does not mean the cash was not important, nor that we will miss it if it dries up.
The UK Government pledged to replace the funding, a promise that has not been met in full, but they have only done so on their own terms and in doing so have effectively excluded the democratically elected Welsh Government from many of the decisions, while ensuring that more prosperous areas (read Tory seats) also get funding. In other words the money is less focussed on need, and continues to have less impact than it should.
One of the outcomes of this decision-making process is that the Welsh Government has refused to co-operate with their UK equivalent and, according to this article in Wales-online, that is a huge issue. They report on the findings of the Senedd Finance Committee that Wales could miss out on vital funding due to a "lack of cooperation between the Welsh and UK governments:
It [the Finance Committee's report] said three new funding schemes - the community renewal fund (CRF), levelling up fund (LUF) and the shared prosperity fund (SPF) - designed to replace previous EU funding in UK nations represented a "seismic shift in the way that money is allocated to Wales", which it claims was the largest recipient of EU funding relative to its population of all the UK nations.
But it said implementing these funds had been "endangered by a lack of engagement between the Welsh and UK governments", difficulties by local councils in submitting funding bids and the UK government "bypassing the Welsh Government and the Senedd" to fund Welsh projects.
While Wales received £46.9 million - or 23% - of the overall community relief fund funding, the Welsh Government described its allocation as a “scattergun approach” which it said would have been better spent if it had been deployed more strategically. The bidding process for funding was also criticised by some Welsh councils, including Pembrokeshire County Council, which called the community relief fund process "inherently wasteful", and the Welsh Local Government Association (WLGA), which complained over the level of resources councils and other organisations have to put into bidding with no guarantee of success. The WLGA said it was was too soon to judge whether the new funds were less bureaucratic than EU funds but added that there was "still quite an extensive range of evidence and material that had to be pulled together" for those applying.
Minister for Economy Vaughan Gething said it was “plain that some of the projects that have gone in aren’t aligned with Welsh Government priorities”. The finance committee said it was "particularly disappointed to hear about a lack of engagement between the Welsh and UK governments" on funding and called on the UK government to consider the time and resources needed by local authorities to submit bids.
The report also criticised the £2.6 billion shared prosperity fund (SPF), which was launched in April 2022 to cover different parts of the UK until 2024/25. It said there had been "very little detail" on the fund since it was announced in 2017 and noted a number of Welsh councils which said progress on the fund had been "slow" and that meaningful engagement between the UK Government and the Welsh Government had only taken place relatively recently. It said the Welsh Government had not endorsed the UK Government’s approach to the SPF as it said the funding formula "redirects funds away from those areas where poverty is most concentrated" in Wales and that its share of the funding was over £1 billion less than what it would have expected to receive from the EU between January 2021 and March 2025.
While it admitted that the new funding processes were "new and likely to experience teething-problems", the Senedd committee said it had "sympathy with the Welsh Government that it is being bypassed" by the UK government's approach and believed the Senedd was "in danger of being side-lined and that further consideration is required to ensure that effective parliamentary scrutiny of these and any future replacements funds takes place in Wales."
There is fault on both sides here, but it is the Welsh economy which is missing out. If an accommodation is not reached soon then this will be another tranche of funding that will have been wasted.
The UK Government pledged to replace the funding, a promise that has not been met in full, but they have only done so on their own terms and in doing so have effectively excluded the democratically elected Welsh Government from many of the decisions, while ensuring that more prosperous areas (read Tory seats) also get funding. In other words the money is less focussed on need, and continues to have less impact than it should.
One of the outcomes of this decision-making process is that the Welsh Government has refused to co-operate with their UK equivalent and, according to this article in Wales-online, that is a huge issue. They report on the findings of the Senedd Finance Committee that Wales could miss out on vital funding due to a "lack of cooperation between the Welsh and UK governments:
It [the Finance Committee's report] said three new funding schemes - the community renewal fund (CRF), levelling up fund (LUF) and the shared prosperity fund (SPF) - designed to replace previous EU funding in UK nations represented a "seismic shift in the way that money is allocated to Wales", which it claims was the largest recipient of EU funding relative to its population of all the UK nations.
But it said implementing these funds had been "endangered by a lack of engagement between the Welsh and UK governments", difficulties by local councils in submitting funding bids and the UK government "bypassing the Welsh Government and the Senedd" to fund Welsh projects.
While Wales received £46.9 million - or 23% - of the overall community relief fund funding, the Welsh Government described its allocation as a “scattergun approach” which it said would have been better spent if it had been deployed more strategically. The bidding process for funding was also criticised by some Welsh councils, including Pembrokeshire County Council, which called the community relief fund process "inherently wasteful", and the Welsh Local Government Association (WLGA), which complained over the level of resources councils and other organisations have to put into bidding with no guarantee of success. The WLGA said it was was too soon to judge whether the new funds were less bureaucratic than EU funds but added that there was "still quite an extensive range of evidence and material that had to be pulled together" for those applying.
Minister for Economy Vaughan Gething said it was “plain that some of the projects that have gone in aren’t aligned with Welsh Government priorities”. The finance committee said it was "particularly disappointed to hear about a lack of engagement between the Welsh and UK governments" on funding and called on the UK government to consider the time and resources needed by local authorities to submit bids.
The report also criticised the £2.6 billion shared prosperity fund (SPF), which was launched in April 2022 to cover different parts of the UK until 2024/25. It said there had been "very little detail" on the fund since it was announced in 2017 and noted a number of Welsh councils which said progress on the fund had been "slow" and that meaningful engagement between the UK Government and the Welsh Government had only taken place relatively recently. It said the Welsh Government had not endorsed the UK Government’s approach to the SPF as it said the funding formula "redirects funds away from those areas where poverty is most concentrated" in Wales and that its share of the funding was over £1 billion less than what it would have expected to receive from the EU between January 2021 and March 2025.
While it admitted that the new funding processes were "new and likely to experience teething-problems", the Senedd committee said it had "sympathy with the Welsh Government that it is being bypassed" by the UK government's approach and believed the Senedd was "in danger of being side-lined and that further consideration is required to ensure that effective parliamentary scrutiny of these and any future replacements funds takes place in Wales."
There is fault on both sides here, but it is the Welsh economy which is missing out. If an accommodation is not reached soon then this will be another tranche of funding that will have been wasted.
