The county enterprise boards will be established as limited liability companies in the middle of May. The legal documentation necessary has been cleared by the Department of Finance following considerable discussion. The delay was not a source of comfort for me or any of the members of the 35 county enterprise boards. The original structure, inherited from the Department of Finance, was the County Western structure which tended to have a slow and bureaucratic way of processing, approving and releasing funding for projects. These difficulties have been addressed and this structure will be replaced by boards established as limited liability companies and given a block financial allocation which they will be able to pay out directly.
This principle is not applied only in the case of county enterprise boards but to all grants. As Deputies will recall, in the case of home improvement grants, while approval was issued the grant was not paid until the work had been carried out and until two thirds of the cost has been met by the applicant. It is not the fault of the officials responsible for administering the scheme that only £300,000 of the total of £7 million has been paid out, as applicants have a responsibility to provide the balance of the finance for the project. The county enterprise boards will not provide all the finance required. When the boards are established as limited liability companies no later than the end of May applications will be processed more speedily. I am not satisfied with the present system which is too bureaucratic.