To ask the Secretary of State for Education and Skills how much public funding is planned to be made available to Darlington College of Art (a) if it remains in Darlington and (b) if it moves to Plymouth, Torbay or Falmouth; whether the college would be eligible for Objective One funding if it moved to Falmouth; and if he will make a statement. (118401)

[holding answer 2 February 2007]: The statutory responsibility for funding individual higher education institutions in England rests with the Higher Education Funding Council for England which uses funding formulae which take no account of the locations mentioned in this Question. The college currently receives core funding through recurrent grant of over £4.1 million a year. On Objective One funding, it is unlikely that any substantive Darlington college project could be funded from the current Objective One programme as this funding is close to being already fully allocated. New EU structural fund programmes are still under development and so it is too early to say whether any project that comes forward would be able to access funding from these future programmes.