Regional Growth Fund Update

Mark Prisk Excerpts

Tuesday 15th May 2012 Written Statements

[The Minister of State, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (Mr Mark Prisk)]

The regional growth fund (RGF) has allocated conditional offers to the value of £1.4 billion to projects and programmes during the first two rounds of bidding during 2010 and 2011. Below is an update on progress with these projects.

In November 2011, due to the RGF programme’s success, an additional £1 billion was allocated to the fund by the Chancellor, and round 3 opened for bidding in February 2012. The RGF objectives for round 3 remain the same, and the application process has been simplified.

The RGF secretariat has been travelling across England to encourage and support potential bidders and will continue to do so until round 3 closes at noon on 13 June.

Rounds 1 and 2—update

From the previous rounds, 176 successful bids have been conditionally allocated £1.4 billion.

This translates into 237 final offer agreements because some bids comprise of multiple counter-parties.

Of the 237 agreements:

82 have a final agreement in place, to a value of almost £610 million. These projects are able to draw down their funding. These projects leverage over £3 billion of private sector investment.

60 have agreed terms and conditions including leverage, funding and jobs—these will now proceed through due diligence and represent a further £4 billion of private sector investment.

10 have withdrawn from the RGF process (see list at Annex A), which has released up to £15 million to be recycled into the RGF, or used at Ministers’ discretion to support companies and local areas identified as experiencing economic difficulties.

85 companies have received draft offers, but are still considering terms and conditions.

The next update on RGF progress will be in July 2012.

Annex A - List of withdrawn projects

Thales Properties Ltd (Leicester)

Cumbrian Holdings (County Durham)

Zegen (Wilton) Limited (Leeds)

Ames Goldsmith UK Ltd (Liverpool)

Messier-Dowty Ltd (Gloucester)

Rapiscan Systems (Redhill)

T&N Plastics Limited (Grimsby)

Conitech (Northumberland)

Irwin and sons (Dungannon)

Diodes Zetex (Oldham)