ERDF Projects: final claims review

Various Scottish Enterprise (SE) projects receive funding from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF); the purpose of this review is to bring together information about projects which received funding between 2000 and 2006 and which failed to submit all the data required for their final claim to the ERDF. Nine projects from across Scotland were identified for inclusion in this review. The review sought to assess a range of standard ERDF target and outcome data as well as project-specific data. The time period under review was 2005 to 2008.

An in-depth survey was undertaken with companies supported by ERDF-funded SE projects which were not client or account managed. Work to update company data was carried out before the survey began. Attempts were made to contact all 330 companies across the nine ERDF-funded programmes, primarily by telephone. The completed survey response rate was 59%.

Data on each project was collated. The survey looked at information including: sales increases; the number of new/improved processes introduced; the number of organisations taking up e-commerce; the number of jobs created for minority groups; the number of businesses surviving to 18 and 36 months; and the number of new exporters/businesses entering new markets.

Four recommendations were made: consideration should be given to assessing the net economic benefits of these projects through the SE Strategic, Economics, Evaluation and Research (SEER) Planning process; for the next round of European-funded projects, the process for ongoing collection of project monitoring data required for funding claims should be reviewed and appropriate procedures put in place for this as early as possible; consideration should be given as to how data on ethnicity be gathered in the future as a number of respondents found questions on this subject offensive; and company contact detail updates gathered by the consultants during this survey should be updated on the appropriate SE systems.