OT EU DIY job gone wrong?

[harryagain]

[Bill Taylor]

We visited that a couple of years ago, and my thought at the time was that it's only purpose was as a subsidy attractor. Apart from us there were no visitors to the gallery and the only other people there apart from the staff were friends of the staff in the cafe.

It was too far from any centre of population and didn't have anything much to attract visitors.

[Adrian]

Ah, the good ol' Torygraph.

Yes, it "cost £3.4m".

But, of that, only £900k was an EU grant. The rest was private money.

Doesn't it seem a tad off that a paper which champions private enterprise and capitalism is cheering and crowing because a private business has closed - in an area that badly needs jobs - after losing at least £2.5m.

[Richard]

It is not the Telegraph who caused the 'failure'. That was decided at the outset when the project was conceived.

[Nightjar]

The fund is to support innovation, research, development, job creation, small businesses, social inclusion and the low carbon economy where conventional financing is not available. Given that, it will be unavoidable that there will be failures, otherwise conventional funding would not be difficult to find. If the critics couldn't find more than around £30 million of projects that went wrong out of a £40 billion budget for speculative developments, I would say the schemes was doing quite well.

Colin Bignell

[Adrian]

Who ever said it was?

I'm commenting on the deliberately inaccurate journalism, not the management or the concept of the centre.

[Sam Plusnet]

Since you've entirely missed the point, you may have a future with the Daily Telegraph.

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , Richard escribió:

Your English comprehension needs some work. You may be better off reading something less intellectually demanding, like the Sun.

[Richard]

Well, I did completely understand that the Telegraph was not to blame. Sure they did the usual media (of whichever leaning) thing of spinning it. The EU is entirely to blame for giving scammers the opportunity to steal money from the like of you and I. Of course, I am assuming that you pay taxes. It is you and the others replying thus far to my comments who appear to be intellectually stunted, being unable or unwilling to see the obvious truth.

[Adrian]

What you didn't understand, even slightly, was that nobody said they were.

Again, what you completely failed to understand even the faintest modicum of was that the people behind the project almost certainly _weren't_ "scammers", at least not with the EU as the main target - since the £900k the EU fund contributed was only a fraction of the £3.6m lost.

And, as has been pointed out, if only £30m of a £40bn development budget

- inherently high risk - is lost, that appears to be a very good result. And a very good use of money, if it enables successful projects with similar ratios of other investment.

The obvious truth that everybody else has discerned probably differs markedly from what you believe it to be.

[Brian_Gaff]

OK maybe it should be turned into a lap dancing club, that should fix it..... Brian

[Michael Kilpatrick]

The paper also highlights other spending issues, including this bit:

***

The Court of Auditors, the official body which inspects the EU?s finances, has raised concerns about the spending of structural funds.

In the summer it published a critical report into the £54?billion spent on road building schemes across the EU since 2000. The court concluded that ?insufficient attention was paid to ensuring cost-effectiveness of the projects?. It found that motorways were being built where regular ?express? roads would have sufficed.

Out of 24 road schemes audited, only seven were built at the original contract price. In almost half, the costs overran by at least a fifth.

***

Well, all I can say is that if only half of purely British-funded British infrastructure or major construction projects (with no EU concern at all) overran their budgets "by at least a fifth" (meaning that the other half were either in budget or overrunning by less than

20%) I'd be quite happy, because it seems to the case that most infrastructure projects in the public eye overrun by anything from 50% to 100% of the original cost.

For example, the design contracts for HS have hit 20% overspend already, and we know that the total cost estimates rose quickly from £30bn to £43bn, which is more than a third overrun.

The Cambridge guided bus cost exactly 20% more than was originally planned.

So, a fifth overrun seems rather par for the course. In that case, what exactly is the Telegraph's point with respect to the EU, here?

Michael

[Adrian]

Does it really need one?

[harryagain]

It's Wales.Sheep shagging is thelocal pastime.