What does Bill McLean (Letters, 6 May) intend to convey when he uses inverted commas round the word "region" and tells us that this punctuation is a clue to England's nine regions and the fact that West Midlands pays less tax and receives more financial support than Scotland?
The 12 regions of the UK – not to be confused with the identically named Scottish local government areas – were designed in Brussels prior to 1971, before we entered the then EEC, as the release of confidential papers in 2002 revealed. The demarcatio
n of UK regions, of which Scotland is one, was necessary to direct the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), which began operating in 1975.
More recently, government regional offices and development agencies were established in England as a decentralising move, with the development agencies equivalent to that already existing in Scotland, but later renamed Scottish Enterprise. Unrelated English regional chambers (promptly redubbed "assemblies" by their participants) were intended to monitor agency spending and co-ordinate structural plans.
And surely if the West Midlands pays less tax and receives more support than Scotland at national level, this merely reflects its relative prosperity, as acknowledged by the distribution of ERDF and its monitoring by the European Commission.
MARY ROLLS
Westkirk
Langholm, Dumfriesshire The full article contains 212 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
