On the question of value for money and retaining jobs, there's essentially no criterion for approving a project that's based on that objective. You have an objective of retaining jobs, but you don't have an eligibility criterion from the applicants saying that they will retain this number of jobs, or this number of jobs per dollar spent, and so on.
It goes back to basic performance management. If you have an objective of retaining jobs, you need to establish a target and a way of measuring that, and of measuring the efficiency which which the target is being met. Those are all absent, so you'd have to start from scratch on that.