Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-03-17-Speech-5-054"
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"Mr President, it is with particular interest that I rise to speak in this debate today. Great Britain, as a whole, receives some £10 billion in support from the Structural Funds programme. Indeed parts of my own constituency, the West Midlands, have been awarded £550 million under the Objective II strand.
In addition to the Structural Funds programme the European Union, by having this programme, is indeed providing an opportunity – an opportunity for regions to develop and for communities to strengthen; an opportunity for businesses to prosper and for people's lives to be improved. The Structural Funds programme provides, in many cases, the single most important and positive opportunity for our own worst-hit and most deprived areas to get up off their knees and back on their feet. This is a laudable objective and something that every Member of this Parliament would, I hope, support.
But Structural Funds also provide an opportunity for national governments. If unregulated and unmonitored, they are an opportunity for national governments to ease their cash burden and to iron out their accounting difficulties – or indeed more cynically, one could say, to siphon away a war chest or pay for vote-winning tax reductions. Granting of Structural Funds is often trumpeted by governments as a sign of its success, whereas in truth it is merely a recognition of difficult problems that a region faces. The aim of the Structural Funds programme is not to help governments win elections, but to help the lives of Europe's citizens. It is a great shame, therefore, that just by having this debate today, we are signalling our awareness that money from the Structural Funds programme is not allocated in many Member States as it should be.
We are accepting the fact, for example, that matching funding is often not provided by national governments and that, by clever accounting, figures are all too often shrouded and fudged. So what can we do? What can be done to ensure that our aims and objectives are met? To begin with, additionality must mean exactly that – additional funds being spent where they are most needed and on the most important projects. We must work harder to ensure that the true figures for spending are rigorously checked and that spending is identified more clearly. Only recently the Commission published a devastating critique of the UK Government's handling of the Structural Funds, due in large part to the inequality of public sector matching funding. This is clearly not acceptable.
In one area alone – Liverpool and Merseyside – the lack of support by the UK Treasury is putting at risk the creation of
10 000 jobs, and up to 5 000 existing ones will be lost, according to a report by the Liverpool Chamber of Commerce. The end result of all this is that private-sector partners will have little confidence in projects, often resulting in the failure of worthwhile schemes.
To conclude, as I have said previously in this House in previous debates on the subject, we must endeavour to ensure that these funds are seen not as a hand-out but as a hand-up."@en1
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