Newspaper column 28 April - More on the Shared Prosperity Fund

In my column last week I spent some time discussing the recent confirmed allocation from the UK Shared Prosperity Fund, the Government’s replacement to European Union structural funding after Brexit.

However I was concerned to see last week local opposition figures repeatedly quoted in the press, without challenge that because the Government had not given Cornwall Council what it had asked for, £100million a year, that this was somehow leaving Cornwall worse off.

To be clear, I have no issue whatsoever with Cornwall Council asking for £100million per year in funding. Such processes are often negotiations and in negotiations it is not common to get exactly what you ask for.

That being said, what I do take umbrage with is the repeated claims that Cornwall had to have £100million a year, to not be worse off, and that the £100million a year figure equates to either a figure in EU Structural Funds that we used to receive, or more bizarrely, that it is somehow equal to the amount we ‘could have received’ should we have still been in the EU.

Both these figures are easy to fact check, and so along with my Cornish MP colleagues, that is what I did, with the House of Commons Library, a strictly politically neutral and impartial organisation that exists to serve MPs of all parties.

The House of Commons Library replied quickly and confirmed that Cornwall and Isles of Scilly received an average of just over £50 million per year between 2010 and 2018, the last year that figures are available. This is clearly not the £100million per year that has been widely touted as being the number we received, and in fact, Cornwall received £13.1million in 2015, and even less in 2017, receiving £8.7million. It’s also important not to forget that the EU structural funding was poorly targeted and difficult to access, meaning it often went on obscure projects that did not give much wider benefit, or worse, was returned unspent.

Regarding amounts that would have been received had the UK remained part of the EU, the House of Commons Library said:

“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.”

So the £100million per year figure simply does not add up, either from a historic or contemporary context.

We released this information last week. Of course there was the entirely predictable outraged response from certain political figures with an axe to grind and an agenda to pursue, as well as from some people who perhaps should have checked the facts presented to them before parroting them.

But crucially none of these people have been able to justify or breakdown the £100million figure. I have asked for anyone who can provide this analysis, outside of a line on a Cornwall Council report, to provide it to me, so I can get it fact-checked by the House of Commons Library. But there has been no response. The offer remains open.

In the meantime, away from all the mudslinging and political gamesmanship, I will continue to deliver for the people of Truro and Falmouth. The UK Shared Prosperity Fund will enable the Government to work with local organisations to do this, along with the myriad of other funding streams, such as the Levelling Up Fund and Towns Deals that we are already in the process of applying for and benefitting from.