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Cumbria County Council is sending two senior councillors to Brussels this week to take part in a lobby over new proposals for European regional funding. Councillor Lawson Short, Cabinet member with responsibility for economic development and regeneration, and Councillor Kevan Wilkinson, Cabinet member with responsibility for transport and infrastructure, are spending two days in Brussels, March 16 and 17.

Councillor Short said:

"The changes in European regional development policy which are planned will have a major impact on regeneration funding for Britain as a whole. In Cumbria the effect will be particularly severe.

"Cumbria's need for regeneration support is growing and yet under the proposed policy it will be much harder for the county to win European funding.

"Part of our mission in Brussels is to discover as much as we can about the detailed implications of the changes."

Councillor Wilkinson said:

"We will be impressing on the European Commission the special economic difficulties which Cumbria faces in comparison with other areas of Britain.

"The present European funding is going to disappear, but meanwhile Cumbria's economic base is deteriorating.

"Cumbria is suffering particularly from the long-term decline and disappearance of traditional industries like mining and agriculture. In an area such as ours it is not easy to create new forms of economic activity to replace them. We still need substantial support from Europe."

The European Commission has recently produced a report, A New Partnership for Cohesion, which contains its proposals for regional development policy for 2007-2013.  Regional policy is aimed at smoothing out economic differences between different areas of the European Union.

With the admission to the EU of 10 new member states, many of them representing the poorer parts of Europe,  the relative position of Britain and especially Cumbria has changed. Britain as a whole will be higher up the league table of wealthy EU members and the UK regions will find it harder to access funds from Brussels.

Meanwhile Cumbria is the only sub-region in Britain to have suffered negative growth and show a fall in economic output, making its need for regeneration support more acute.