Alongside the single market, the EEC/EU’s regional policy is perhaps the greatest legacy of the UK’s influence on the “European project”, following its accession 50 years ago. As noted by Lisa O’Carroll, Seán Clarke and Pamela Duncan (UK ministers pledged to match EU funds after Brexit. How’s that going?, 30 December), since then the European regional development fund (ERDF), European social fund (ESF) and other EU structural funds have played a significant and, in places, transformational role in supporting place-based development across the UK.
They also detail the delays, reduced funding, loss of institutional capacity, shorter programme lengths, challenges to devolution and other problems with the patchwork of UK funds supposed to replace the EU’s multi-annual and needs-based regional programmes. As the article also notes, it is difficult to compare like for like as regards past and current funding levels.
However, in making comparisons it is misleading to tot up the funding now being brought forward through the UK shared prosperity fund (UKSPF) with various other funding sources to try and argue – as one Conservative voter from Cornwall does in the article – that this means there is an equivalent level of funding. The obvious reason is that there have always been other UK regeneration and social funds available alongside EU programmes, with principles such as “additionality” meaning that EU funding was designed to leverage match-funding from other public and private sources. Had we remained in the EU, the UK government could still have pursued initiatives such as the rural England prosperity fund and the towns fund mentioned in the article, but these might have been combined with the resources brought by EU regional programmes for maximum impact.
Dr Olivier Sykes
Department of geography and planning, University of Liverpool
