The reimbursement claims which the Scottish Government will submit to the European Commission (EC): EIR Release

Information requested

In the Scottish Parliament on 26th June 2024, the following exchange occurred:

Brian Whittle (South Scotland) (Con)

I will try again to get an answer to the question that was posed by my colleagues and has been avoided by the Deputy First Minister. I will put it really simply: how much of the €136 million that was not committed at the end of 2023 is still eligible to be reclaimed?

Kate Forbes

We will try to reclaim all of it.

We also know that all programme spending had to cease by the end of 2023. The €136m which the Scottish Government is planning to reclaim from the EC is therefore a total which had already been spent by the end of 2023.

Please provide a detailed breakdown of the individual programmes which make up the €136m total. In other words: please provide a programme by programme list of the reimbursement claims which the Scottish Government will submit to the EC, which sums to the €136m total.

Response

The figure referred to in the question (€136m) relates to funding that has not been allocated to support activities funded through the 2014-2020 European programme. The Scottish Government (SG) is committed to working with the European Commission (EC) to maximise all expenditure and plans to claim reimbursements from the EC up to the €136m. This will include additional expenditure that utilises the EC’s Fast-Care initiative to support the resettlement of Ukrainian refugees in Scotland. We are still in the process of verifying the costs to be reclaimed under this initiative and are not able to provide a breakdown at this point. DFM has already committed to update parliament in 2025 once the final outturn figures are known.

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