ABSTRACT
The European Structural Funds have become extremely important for the United Kingdom’s declining and laggard industrial regions. As described in detail earlier in this book European Commission has a system of programming regional expenditures which assumes the existence of regional strategies and coherent regional administrations. In the United Kingdom the Single Programming Documents (SPDs) for the current Objective 1 and 2 areas were finalised by December 1994, at the time when the UK Government was establishing its new system of English Integrated Regional Offices – now known as Government Offices for the Regions (GORs) (Mawson and Spencer 1995a). The GORs are outposts of national government in the regions, rather than regional governments as found in many of the Member States.
