I was surprised to see headlines in a local paper welcoming replacement EU money to Cornwall last week.

The list of successful bids to the Community Renewal Fund (the pilot U.K. replacement pot for the EU money) was out last week.

Cornwall was due to get approximately £100 million from EU funding this year, had we stayed in. Instead we got £1 million from this UK replacement fund. The new Conservative Cornwall Council applied for £3 million and the Government awarded us just £1 million.

The Conservative administration at County Hall didn’t even apply for the ‘Levelling Up Fund’ so Cornwall got nothing from that. (The Scillies however did apply and got funding for ferries.) 

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Just £3m for Cornwall rather than £100m before Brexit, despite Tory promises

The ‘Shared Prosperity Fund’ that we were promised will be the magic bullet that replaces all our lost EU funding £ for £ isn’t released until next year, but the budget told us how much will be in it. It’s been slashed. The figure for 2022/23 is just £0.4 billion for *the whole country*. To keep his promise of replacing Cornwall’s EU money £ for £, the Prime Minister would have to give a quarter of that entire fund just to Cornwall!

So, for all the fluff and grandiose announcements, we’ve seen nothing like the amounts Cornwall was promised. So far, we’re actually getting £1 million this year, a hundredth of what the Prime Minister promised.

We’ve lost our EU funding and the money seems instead to be flowing north to the ‘red wall’. Cornwall is being levelled down, rather than up.

Jayne Kirkham

Labour Group Leader 

Cornwall Council