The chief executive of Social Enterprise North West highlighted the potential high costs involved in bidding for European funding yesterday, saying the charity had to spend £30,000 preparing for a successful bid of £6.6m in funding from Europe.
Val Jones was speaking at a conference on Europe’s social innovation and social business agenda A European Spring?
Jones spoke about her experiences of bidding for European funding in the past and recently. She said she had been dealing with Europe for the past 20 years and she was confident that charities could access European money.
But she warned that European money was also bureaucratic and she highlighted the potential high costs involved in bidding for such funding.
“It took 15 months and cost us £30,000 to get £6.6m in funding from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and 17 partners.
“It’s also a payment-by-results fund. So we had to seek finance to pay providers to deliver the work and wait for the European money. We’ve needed to get significant finance at our cost. Charity Bank has loaned us £200,000 as working capital.”
Jones said the £30,000 in costs to bid for the funding included getting legal advice on state aid, and specialist advice on writing the bid, which Jones said was very complicated. She also said there was a cost in staff time.
The funding, from the ERDF and 17 partners including the Prince's Trust, aims to create more than 850 new jobs, safeguard a further 300 jobs and grow the economy by £4.3m.
The programme, which is to be run by Social Enterprise North West (SENW), will last till 2014. It will target the most deprived areas of Merseyside, targeting individuals and encouraging them to think about a business start-up. Its aim is to create 922 new businesses.
It is the biggest project undertaken by SENW, and Jones has stressed the new companies it supports will be private businesses and sole traders as well as civil society social enterprises.
The ERDF is providing £3.3m of the funding, with the 17 partner organisations matching the cash.
