Frontline: External funding officer

“I’m the external funding officer for an area in the South-East of England. I attract money from sources such as lottery distributors and the EU for projects run by local organisations. I’ve been doing this work for a decade – but over the last couple of years things have been changing very fast.

For one thing, the Government Office for the South-East (GOSE) and the South-East England Development Agency (Seeda) – which handle some European funds – are to be abolished. I won’t really miss Seeda: they ran out of money after the first round of the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), so they couldn’t match-fund any ERDF bids, and when we tried to get them involved in other projects they didn’t show much interest. But GOSE seemed to know what they were doing and were quite inclusive; I’ll miss them.

Because the South-East is quite wealthy, ERDF isn’t worth much: £23m for the region over seven years. But there will be a new programme after the spring bidding round, and when Seeda’s gone it’s not clear who’ll run it. It might be the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG), and it might be our new Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) – but I don’t think the European Commission would be very happy about the LEP handling it, because it’s not a regional body; some LEPs even cross regional boundaries.

I went to a conference recently, and the people from the business department and DCLG recognised the problem. They were saying: ‘We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it’. But I don’t think Eric Pickles thinks about crossing bridges very much. When people raise objections, he seems to see them as creating obstacles rather than offering advice.

Another source of funding is the European Social Fund (ESF). That was meant to cover people who the Department for Work and Pensions weren’t serving: those furthest from the labour market – but the DWP got their sticky paws on it, and I think they use it for more of the same. If we get involved in ESF projects, it’s really a subcontracting role for DWP or the Learning and Skills Council (LSC); the people who were being left behind previously are still being left behind. Now people are worried that if DCLG get their hands on ERDF in the same way as the DWP with ESF, it’ll be yet another arm of central government.

Anyway, there are now delays in the next round of ESF. This is partly because it used to be run mainly by the LSCs and has now been taken over by the Skills Funding Agency, which is itself a new body; and partly, I think, because most of the tenders are being held back to fit into the Work Programme that the government hopes to introduce.

It’s all very opaque – but we’ve had to get used to that in recent years. We used to be kept in better touch when the ESF was run by GOSE with projects at a local level, but now it’s just a national programme. We’ve been taken out of the loop, and we no longer do publicity work to raise awareness of how the EU has supporting our area. Nowadays, we don’t even know how much EU funding has been spent in the area.

The ESF contracts have got much bigger, too, and local providers are being offered rather pitiful subcontracts so they end up working for almost nothing. Obviously, running lots of small projects costs more in administration – and some of the accountable bodies are short-staffed, so they prefer to have a few big contracts. But if we’re to get local and voluntary sector bodies involved in delivery, they need smaller pots of money. Also, the projects should be longer than three years: currently, a new provider spends a year setting up, a year doing the work, and a year winding down again.

At the moment, there’s so much organisational change that it’s hard to keep up with what’s been abolished and what hasn’t. We used to know people who could answer our questions about external funds, but now we don’t know who to work with; a lot of those skills have been lost. And there’s a risk that, if we don’t have the skills to properly audit European funds, the commission will end up clawing them back: the regional development agencies lost a lot of money like that, and now even their expertise is at risk.

Things aren’t much better at the DCLG, which seems to have enormous staff turnover. It sometimes feels as if the civil service is run more for the benefit of the people who work there than for the customers who want a good service. People are moved around so they can get experience of different areas: they arrive, and as soon as they’ve got a grip on the issues, they’re off again. My biggest criticism, though, is that over the years DCLG has shown very variable interest in the European funds they run. Other organisations are good at managing and distributing EU funds – I’ve been impressed by the contractors Ecorys, who run most of the lifelong learning programme – but there’s been a lack of leadership and direction in DCLG’s work for a long time.

Meanwhile, organisations in our area are showing more interest in EU funds. They’re having their funding cut, and while EU schemes have always been considered quite bureaucratic, now that the alternatives are being whittled away it’s becoming more attractive. I just hope that we have new structures in place soon, so we can keep the funds flowing.”