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The Kent Brussels Office is one of many local and regional
Government offices in Brussels that feed back policy advice to
partners. This enables them to be aware of EU policy when taking
strategic decisions or searching for funding
opportunities.
Following EU policy requires constant monitoring of what is
happening and why it is happening. This means that good policy
advice combines making partners aware of EU policy rapidly, with an
analysis of the policy so that partners can judge its relative
importance of the policy for their own operations.
Awareness and analysis of EU policy is one half of the battle.
The other half is trying to influence future EU policy. Influencing
policy may mean trying to get a proposed policy on or off the EU
agenda, or widening or narrowing the scope of any policy. For
example, Kent lobbied strongly to get maritime borders recognised
in the same way as land borders. Doing this gave Kent access to
funds to develop cross-border projects with Nord-Pas de Calais. The
European Affairs Group then lobbied successfully to increase the EU
match funding for cross-border projects (thereby reducing local
partner financial commitment). Future objectives include maximising
EU funding into Kent where this matches our strategic
objectives.
Obviously, Kent cannot always change EU policy on its own. But
the advantage of the Kent Brussels Office is that we are able to
link in with wider networks, for example, UK regions and local
authorities, UK Government and other regions across the EU. This
gives us a more powerful lobbying position, for example,
successfully retaining structural funds for all regions in the UK
post 2006, against the initial wishes of the UK Government.
A clear awareness of EU policy is a key step in obtaining
funding from the EU in the present and, more importantly, in
predicting where funding might come from in the future, plus the
relative importance of that funding. A good example of this is
where the Kent Brussels Office was able to flag up the importance
of the Lisbon Strategy to partners in Kent. The Lisbon Strategy was
a clear shift of spending priorities away from infrastructure and
agriculture towards innovation, research and skills as the EU
economy faced up to increased challenges from globalization. We
were thus able to predict an increased focus on higher education
and skills within the EU, despite education not being a competence
of the EU. We were also able to lobby for increased funding on
research and innovation in structural funds as well as support for
entrepreneurship.
Kent is the UK gateway to mainland Europe and therefore is often
in the front line regarding wider EU problems of transport and
migration. Hence much of our policy work emphasizes the fact that
there needs to be a wider support for gateway points in Europe to
deal with transport and migration
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