EU-funded Programmes (Hansard, 26 November 1999)

§ Mr. Wicks

The principal EU programmes for which my Department has responsibility are the European Social Fund, the Socrates and Leonardo da Vinci education and training action programmes and the Youth Programme. These programmes operate differently in a number of ways. With the major exception of the European Social Fund, most of their activities include transnational activity, i.e. where a UK project promoter receives co-funding from the EU to mount a project involving the UK and one or more participating country. Moreover, while project funding data may relate to an applicant organisation in a particular town, activity may take place elsewhere, or involve participants from other towns or areas. It is therefore not currently possible in many instances to disaggregate the data to be able to say exactly how much funding goes to education and training institutions in individual cities or areas, without contacting all the individual institutions concerned. We are working with the European Commission and other member states to simplify the bureaucracy necessary to run these programmes.

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Data are currently available, broadly in the format requested, relating to the total funding under the European Social Fund, the Leonardo da Vinci training programme and the Erasmus Action (Higher Education) of the Socrates Programme. They are set out in the table. It should be noted that in the case of the European Social Fund, an additional £141 million were paid out in 1998 to projects in England following a central application. The information supplied was collated on the basis of postcode.

£000
Town	Total ESF^1,2	Leonardo da Vinci^2,4	Erasmus—Socrates⁵
a) Southampton	836	769	133
b) Newcastle	2,978	387	225
c) Hull	1,778	295	167
d) Sheffield	8,605		1,593	236
e) Manchester	6,630	1,318	368
f) Rotherham	4,860	263	0
g) Dover³	0	0	0
h) Bristol	2,995	672	218
i) Bath	275	105	111
j) Sunderland	4,310	413	55
k) Birmingham	13,752	1,058	325
I) Leicester	1,749	482	150
¹Figures are based on payments made during 1998.
²Figures relate to the applicant organisation rather than the beneficiary.
³There are currently no EU funded projects (ESF, Leonardo) or applicant organisations (Erasmus) in Dover.
⁴Figures are based on projects live in 1999.
⁵Data include grants allocated to HE institutions in the different towns under their institutional contract and to individual students from those institutions as student grants for academic year 1997–98.