Letter to ERDF partners from Mark Foley

For your information please find below a copy of the letter circulated to ERDF partners from Mark Foley, Department of Communities and Local Government, which provides an update on ERDF.

Dear ERDF Partners,

Since the December update it’s been full steam ahead with activities that will help meet our two main priorities, to fully commit the programme and accelerate spend to meet the 2013 spend target.

At the start of March we received full applications from the Priority Axis 1 bidding round held at the end of 2012 and these are beginning the appraisal process. On 21st February a Challenge Fund was launched for Priorities Axis 1 and 2. The closing date for Outline Applications for large projects (£2 million ERDF and above) was Friday 22nd March, the closing date for small projects (below £2 million ERDF) is Friday 12th April, so please ensure you contact the team before this date if you are planning to submit an outline application.

To date we have been able to award just under £147 million of ERDF funding to 205 projects, and as we see the results coming through from the bidding rounds, these figures will increase significantly.

We recently received good news from the European Commission that our request to be able to support investment in broadband as an eligible programme activity for the ERDF was approved. This means that we can now contribute more than £10 million of ERDF to support local authority-led investments across the East Midlands in broadband over the next two years, further helping to commit our ERDF budget.  Further details on this will be available soon.

Last week we launched the first edition of our ‘Investing in your future Case Study booklet’, which demonstrates through a variety of project case studies the impact and results that are being delivered in the East Midlands. ERDF investment made to date will support the creation of 9,950 jobs, help 3,830 new businesses get started and a further 17,145 existing businesses improve their performance. The booklet is available to view and download from our website.

Our ERDF section of the website has also seen some changes over the last few weeks. Following transfer to the .Gov website at the end of 2012, we have made a number of improvements to make it easier to find and access information on the Programme and documents required for delivering projects. Please make sure you take a few minutes to familiarise yourself with the new layout and structure of the pages. The main ERDF section can be found here.

Going back to our priorities, I would be grateful if projects could continue to submit claims on time and to make us aware of any slippage of expenditure at the earliest opportunity. For those of you with new applications in the system a quick response to appraisal queries would be much appreciated.

We will be running a Procurement Workshop on Monday 29th April at Cumberland Place in Nottingham and I would encourage all project managers to send the appropriate procurement officers to this. More information is available from the team. 

I plan to update you in May on the progress made, however if you have any questions please feel free to contact me or the team in the Nottingham office.

Regards,

Mark Foley
Department for Communities and Local Government