Kate Forbes has been accused of talking “nonsense” after it emerged European Union officials raised concerns that SNP ministers were risking handing back millions of pounds in funding. A bombshell report earlier this month revealed the Scottish Government was expected to return 28% of the European structural and investment funding it received in the past six years having failed to allocate the money.
Economy minister Ms Forbes tried to rubbish a figure of £450 million figure but her explanation at Holyrood was deemed “muddled” and a separate report confirmed £236m was being given back to Brussels in June. Now, The Times reports that minutes of a meeting from 2018 show an EU bureaucrat warning of a “lost opportunity”.
Kris Magnus, representing the European Commission’s regional and urban policy, said Scotland had cut the amount of money it received from the EU for three years in a row. An official note of the meeting records him saying “that any decommitment was a lost opportunity to Scotland, but also to the EU as these are shared programmes”.
He also said Scotland was “lagging” behind other countries when it came to spending EU cash. Wales is on course to return just 9% of its structural and investment funding, England 6% and Northern Ireland 2%.
READ MORE: Scottish Labour calls for an emergency summit on the SNP’s £240m in unspent EU funds
READ MORE: BBC throws out Kate Forbes ‘bias’ accusation as Nats flood broadcaster with complaints
Minutes of other meetings also show representatives of Scottish bodies expressing their disappointment that the money was not being spent. At a meeting in June 2020 the former principal strategy manager at Comhairle nan Eilean Siar Angus Murray claimed programmes “seem to be haemorrhaging money” while Malcolm Leitch, of the Scottish Local Authorities Economic Development, was said to be “disappointed” that “we have lost over €100 million from the Scottish programmes so far”.
Scottish Conservative shadow finance secretary Liz Smith MSP said the minutes were “confirmation that Scotland did lose out on money, and that the loss was significantly out of line with other countries”. She added: “That makes a nonsense of Kate Forbes’s claim that comparisons with other parts of the UK were ‘spurious’.
“An enormous amount of money which should have been spent in Scotland has been handed back to the EU by the SNP. Even more alarming is the identification of ‘serious deficiencies’ in management which led to the SNP government missing out on funding. That too appears to contradict the Deputy First Minister’s statement to the parliament.
“This exposes mismanagement on a colossal scale and an inexcusable waste of money that should have delivered real benefits to Scotland. Kate Forbes has serious questions to answer about how this happened, and why the statement she gave parliament denied this evidence.”
Before Brexit, the UK was the second largest net contributor to the EU budget behind Germany. Although the UK left the EU on January 31, 2020, the previous funding arrangements continued for the rest of the year with £17bn paid in and £4.5bn received – a net contribution of £12.5bn.
A Scottish Government spokeswoman said: “As the deputy first minister has set out to parliament, until all participating countries have completed the accounting and auditing procedures set by the European Commission, comparisons are speculative. The total use of the funds and reimbursements from the European Commission will not be known until the latter half of 2025 at the earliest.”
Addressing parliament earlier this month, Ms Forbes said: “At every turn, we have encouraged our partners to spend allocations of EU funding and to meet the delivery targets. Unfortunately in some cases, projects did contract, for example the number of participants on structural funded apprenticeships were impacted by the pandemic.”
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