T6. Ms P Bradley asked the Minister of Finance whether we are making any headway with the Shared Prosperity Fund, about which Members recently received correspondence from the Minister for Communities and on which he is proactively taking the lead. (AQT 1796/17-22)

We are trying to analyse the outcome of the Community Renewal Fund, which came here recently. As you know, we have made repeated representations to Treasury — Scotland and Wales have made exactly the same representations — that it is funding projects and schemes in our area that do not take account of the Executive's priorities and that we have no function or role in. We were offered a high-level contribution and asked to say whether or not it met our priorities. We had no sense of whether that would actually secure the funding, or whether, if we said that it did not meet our priorities, that might knock a project out of funding and that money would not come back to us to allocate to other priorities.

We have been trying to analyse the first run of funding. To be quite honest, we can see no rhyme or reason as to how the funding was allocated. As a matter of fact, the view of the Executive was not sought on the three projects that got the largest share of the funding. One of the projects was a call centre based in Oxford. I am not sure how that got funding attributed to the Executive; maybe it provides services to us. It is very unsatisfactory, and we will continue to make representation.

I have asked for an analysis of the outcomes of that funding allocation to try to get some sense of it. It does not come through us so we do not know who applied for funding and did not get it. I spoke to the Scottish Finance Minister recently, and she is doing something similar. No doubt, Wales will be doing that. We will go back to Treasury and say, "This not working for us". What we require, particularly on lost EU funding, is that the money comes to us, this institution decides the priorities, and we allocate accordingly — not the random way in which it has been done to date.

There is time for a really brief supplementary question.

I thank the Minister for his answer. I will be brief. We know that many of our funding streams require match funding with EU funding. Have any scoping exercises been done to look at that match funding and at how the shortfall can be met, be that through match funding through the Executive or through other people not in government?

No, there is no sense of that with any of the projects, and I do not think that it could be the case that they would apply for funding on the basis of getting match funding from us, because we are not in that application process. Over the course of last year, we replaced funding that we had lost through the EU. The previous Economy Minister will know that we had to replace skills funding that was lost through the European social fund, but that was at our own expense. If we have to do that again this year, it will be from the Executive's Budget.

Time is up, Members. Please take your ease for a moment or two before we move on to the next item of business.

Mr Speaker, I apologise to you and the House and the Minister, as he is still here, for not being in my place for Question Time.

Thank you, Maurice.

(Mr Deputy Speaker [Mr Beggs] in the Chair)