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		Reform of EU funding useless if money is not spent Thursday, 6 March 2003 The Chancellor, Rt Hon Gordon Brown MP, has proposed that EU regional and structural funds should be repatriated. At present, thanks to overly bureaucratic procedures and a lack of Government initiative, hundreds of millions of pounds of UK regional funding have been left unspent. The 2001 accounts show that UK regions spent under 10% of the £590 million allocated to them, and EU laws mean that any money not spent within two years is reallocated. East Midlands MEP Roger Helmer, who sits on the Regional Affairs Committee in the European Parliament, said: "No matter where the money comes from, systems need to be in place for it to be spent wisely. The Chancellor's late conversion to the repatriation of EU regional funding is welcome but we need a guarantee that there will be genuine reform of the agencies in the UK whose track record to date in spending the money is nothing short of appalling. If the Government is genuinely set on improving the flow of funding to the regions, perhaps it should drop its costly plans for regional assemblies which will be nothing more than over-bureaucratic talking shops."