Apparently, Peterborough City Council has lost out on £1,325 from the EU, meant to go towards a YMCA initiative aimed at encouraging young people to volunteer in local communities, known as the Red Triangle project.
The reason? The Council failed to display the EU logo on the few hundred business cards that were printed as part of the project.
As Jonathan Martin, chief executive of Peterborough and Cambridgeshire YMCA, put it:
It’s a shame that no song and dance has been made about what a success the project was. It seems all the noise is about a lack of logos on some cards.The craziest part here is not the amount lost but that someone, somewhere along the long, complex chain of EU funding actually could be bothered to spend time and taxpayers' resources to work out that the failure to display the EU logo on a few hundred business cards should cost Peterborough City Council exactly £1,325...
You could have looked for an official answer from the Commission.
ReplyDeleteApparently they deny this story as another "Daily Mail" fiction (though their denial does not address the specific case of Peterborough).
http://ec.europa.eu/unitedkingdom/blog/index_en.htm
Surely the real question raised in this article is why Peterborough Council put funding at risk by refusing to acknowledge the source. If it had been any other organisation, such as a local business or regional development agency, would they have been so cavalier?
ReplyDelete