Ms Rose Power:

From our experience of working with the local authorities over the last number of years, we can see a specific improvement where EU liaison project officers are employed within a local authority. We did an analysis of INTERREG projects in the southern region and the amount of EU funding secured by local authorities in which there was an EU project officer was approximately 70% higher than the amount secured by those who did not have an officer in place. I will caveat that by saying, as some of my colleagues have mentioned, that these EU officers in local authorities are funded through the projects they secure. The reality is that, if they secure two or three projects, all of their time will be taken up in managing those two or three projects. They therefore have no time to commit to encouraging participation in EU projects across the wider community. They solely manage the projects that are funding their time. If you are looking at having EU project officers available in the local authorities and if you really want to increase engagement and diversity among the people applying for funding and to really scale up, the way to do that is to nationally fund these EU project officers, irrespective of whether they have secured an EU project. In that way, they will be available to the community and to their locations to provide support.

I will just mention one other thing. Within the Southern Regional Assembly, we have set up a European territorial network. We have approximately 200 members, who come from a diverse range of technological universities, universities, local authorities, civil society, social enterprises and SMEs. We provide a capacity-building platform and network to allow, support and encourage more people to get involved in EU projects and EU funding. That operates across all of the INTERREG programmes. We provide that to our members as a service through online webinars, bringing in expert speakers, and providing them with advice on putting applications together, building consortiums for projects and managing their projects going forward. I would encourage the making available of more resources because, while we do in-person events and some online events, we could do more if we had more resources to support that.