Dr. Cecil Beamish:

They were not approved. I cannot say people did not apply. BIM runs the grant schemes but they were not approved because the Commission had made that very clear.

All of the grant aid schemes are monitored by the operational monitoring committee on which the Commission, industry and everybody else sits. The Commission has repeatedly made it clear that, unless the licence is compliant with EU legislation, it cannot get development funding. It is a position out of which we are working. That was one of the implications.