Click on any image for a larger version1. A consideration of the application of the principle of additionality by the UK to EU funding.
The extracts below are from an internal UK civil service letter from the Northern Ireland Office (NIO) to the UK Treasury discussing how additionality might be applied to new EU funding to be made available in the context of the Northern Ireland Peace Programme (1994).
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The requirement for additionality by the EU means that both EU funding and the required matching national funding must be in addition to whatever national expenditure had already been allocated for the period in question. It is not cut and dried in the sense that some expenditure may be planned to include EU funding, but the basic principle is that the EU funding and its national matching funding must give rise to expenditure that would not have gone ahead without them.
There is clearly some scope here for manipulation by the national authorities but the remark that the EU is already suspicious of the UK's compliance with additionality requirements suggests that the UK is in fact cheating in this area.
When this is combined with the known attitude of the UK that at least a proportion of EU funding is actually the UK's own money (ie their contribution to the EU budget) simply coming back to them and their resentment at being told by the Commission how to spend their "own money", you can see, at least from the UK point of view, their rationale for their cheating.
This has persisted from the early days of EU regional funding and right through to my time in the initial phases of the Peace Programme.
When a former senior NIO official refers in a recent interview to the UK's 171/2% contribution to the EU budget in the context of additionality, I thought I got an insight into how the additionality calculations might be done from the UK side.
The example I give below may be on the extreme side, but who knows what they had been getting away with which gave rise to EU suspicions.
OK. Let's say we look at possible expenditure of 100. Let us assume for the sake of argument that it is to be funded 50/50 EU/UK and that the UK contribution to the EU budget is 20%.
The EU will expect this to be funded by 50 from EU funds (blue) and 50 from UK matching funding (red). However the UK will consider that the EU 50 is made up of 10 (=20%) of their "own" money and 40 "net" from the (rest of the) EU. They therefore only need to match the "nett" EU 40 with matching national funding. But 10 of this is already there so they only need to add another 30 national funding.
The EU will now view what has become 80 as being matched 40/40 while the UK will get away with an effective additionality rate of 50/30.
If this was the case, and I admit it may be a bit cunningly extreme, it is no wonder the Commission was getting suspicious and amazing that they would not have copped this in the first place.
So perhaps the cheat was a lot more subtle than my crude example above.
2. No Border Controls
The UK has this weird conviction that if there were no border controls between GB/NI/IRL there would be no need for the Protocol.
This idea was expressed recently by the same NIO official referred to above.
Indeed, it was invoked by Theresa May at a European summit during the Brexit "negotiations". I commented on it in my blog post review of Michel Barnier's book, La Grande Illusion:
No Deal?
In March 2019 as the final deadline for exit approached there was a distinct possibility of a no deal. Theresa May was at the pin of her collar before the European Council arguing for another extension in the hope of getting her WA through the British parliament. There was a general air of exasperation among Council participants and even suggestions that if UK was to go they should go now. One participant put it to May that the Council was not willing to change one line of the agreement and if UK exited with no deal Leo Varadkar would be obliged to introduce controls between Ireland and Northern Ireland.
Theresa May répond que pendant un certain temps après un no deal en Irlande de notre coté, nous ne ferons pas de contrôles.
Which just about shows how little she understood, or cared about, what was going on.
This attitude illustrates the degree to which the UK has no appreciation, or maybe no tolerance, of the EU Single Market now that they are outside of it. They have gone from enthusiastically supporting it when they were inside to attempting to subvert it now that they are outside. They are not known as "perfidious Albion" for nothing.
My review: https://photopol.blogspot.com/2021/08/la-grande-illusion.html
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