Who will benefit from the flood grant?

By Chris Mason
BBC News, European Parliament, Strasbourg

Tewkesbury was badly flooded in the summer of 2007 UK to get £120m EU flood aid

"At long last!" exclaims Edward Mcmillan-Scott, breathing an audible sigh of relief.

Mr Mcmillan-Scott, a MEP representing Yorkshire and the Humber, has campaigned for months for the UK to get a grant from the European Union's so-called Solidarity Fund.

This is the pot of money the bloc sets aside for member states to apply for when they suffer a natural disaster.

Now he has got what he wants.

"The government was slow in making this application, and the mechanisms within the EU for sorting it out were slow as well," he says.

And yes, the European Union's bureaucratic cogs rarely turn at an Olympian pace.

Black holes

But, after months of negotiations, the European Parliament has voted by a massive majority for the UK to receive the second biggest payout ever from this fund - more than £120m.

Some 639 MEPs voted in favour of it, just nine voted against.

The money will arrive in the spring - and public bodies such as councils, ambulance trusts and fire services can now make their case to the government for a share of the funding.

We have got the money - and we will put it to good use Richard Corbett MEP

Ministers didn't want to be seen to be dividing up who would get the money before the cheque actually arrived.

So where will the funding eventually go?

How much will be spent in places like Toll Bar near Doncaster in South Yorkshire, where some homes after the floods were no more than shells - with no floors and no plaster on the walls - and staircases that had to be ripped out?

And what about Hull - where 17,000 properties were affected?

The rules mean that the money has to be spent by public bodies - and not private individuals.

Toll Bar post office only reopened eight months after the floods

And some of it, inevitably, will simply fill in the black holes left in the budgets of local authorities and emergency services who spent rather more last summer than they usually do.

But others here are confident you and I will notice some of the benefits the money can bring.

"We have got the money - and we will put it to good use," Labour MEP Richard Corbett, who also represents Yorkshire and the Humber, tells me.

He recognises that a lot of the funding is likely to go to those areas in south west England badly affected by the floods - such as Gloucestershire, Herefordshire and Worcestershire.

"But a good proportion of it will come to Yorkshire too," he insists.

"It's absolutely crucial the authorities put in their bids for this funding now - so they get what they are entitled to."

Once the money is allocated, there are one or two European strings attached to it that will determine how it can be spent.

'Detailed decisions'

It is regarded as an emergency grant - and so will not be used for long-term projects such as improving flood defences.

But it can be used to rebuild roads and bridges damaged by the floods, to help meet the costs of cleaning up and the funding of temporary accommodation.

Broadly speaking, British MEPs here in Strasbourg think the decision taken by the Parliament is a positive one.

But not everyone is happy.

About 48,000 homes and 7,000 businesses in England were flooded

Godfrey Bloom is one of the United Kingdom Independence Party's MEPs -he too represents Yorkshire and the Humber.

He says he is struggling to muster a "thank you" to his European colleagues for the handout - and draws an analogy to explain why.

"If you were robbed in the street and had your wallet stolen, you'd be pretty annoyed," he says.

"And then if you begged with the thief to give you enough change for the bus ride home, you wouldn't be that grateful if he gave you back 50p and then cleared off with a wad of your notes."

His suggestion is that compared with the amount the Yorkshire and Humber region pays into the EU - a figure he claims is £900m per year, £120m for the whole of the UK is a paltry sum.

Mr Bloom's view, though, among the MEPs I spoke to, is a marginal one.

Meanwhile at Westminster, the Local Government Minister John Healey says the process of making "detailed decisions" on where the money will go will soon begin.

It's likely that within a couple of months we will know just how much each region of the country is going to get.