Member Article

Liverpool’s SENW must pay back £1.4 million

A demand notice has been issued to Liverpool’s Social Enterprise North West (SENW) to recover £1.4 million of public money after serious irregularities in its accounts were uncovered.

The money forms part of a grant given to SENW to run a business advisory service in Liverpool called the Big Enterprise in Communities project (BEiC).

Launched in January 2012, the project, run by SENW together with 17 supporting organisations, received a total of £3.79 million from the European Regional Development Fund, administered by the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) on behalf of the British taxpayer.

However in July 2014, an audit carried out by the Audit Authority in accordance with European Commission rules identified serious breaches in the project’s accounts.

Under the terms of European grant funding, SENW is required to show how all public money it has received for the BEiC project has been spent.

Failure by the SENW to do so has forced the DCLG to take action to recover the money, by issuing a demand notice.

The DCLG’s demand notice will not seek to reclaim any of the money from BEiC’s 17 supporting organisations, who operated in good faith throughout.

With just 6 months of the grant funding to go, the BEiC project has already exceeded initial expectations – providing 3,128 businesses with start up support in Liverpool and the surrounding area.

Communities Minister Lord Ahmad said: “I accept that European Commission rules can be very bureaucratic but in this case they are perfectly clear – failure to provide evidence of how money is spent puts the funding at risk.

“The DCLG has a clear obligation to make sure every pound of taxpayers’ money is properly accounted for.

“It is totally unacceptable that SENW cannot provide proper accounts for £1.4 million worth of public money.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Sophia Taha .