Tuesday, 11 March 2008

The Hertfordshire Infrastructure Consortium has been passed as “fit for purpose” by Capacitybuilders. I heard this morning that the Cambridgeshire Consortium has not received this accolade and so won’t receive any Capacitybuilders project funding this year. Sometime ago, the Norfolk Consortium took a decision not even to apply for funding. And COVER, the voluntary sector co-ordinating body for the Easter Region has also now decided not to accept Capacitybuilders funding.

This means that in the Eastern Region as a whole only four counties have in place effective / funded Consortia. This is not good.

This morning, the Hertfordshire Infrastructure Consortium met in Watford and there was a good turn-out and a pretty thorough discussion about where the Consortium stands.

HCC is currently drawing together its new Local Area Agreement. From what I had heard, I had complacently believed that HCC was considering a straight choice between including in its plan Indicator 6 (the number of people volunteering) and Indicator 7 (a healthy environment for voluntary organisations). Today I heard from Ethel (the LAA / VCS Liaison Officer) that in fact HCC want to reject both indicators.

Several reasons were advanced for this, but not having a specific target for the voluntary sector will effectively exclude the voluntary sector from the LAA process, or at best relegate the voluntary sector to the margins.

Something must be done and this morning we tried to rouse everyone to respond urgently to the soon-to-close consultation process.

In the afternoon, we hosted a meeting of the Hertfordshire Compact Working Group. It is difficult to get people to commit to meetings of the Compact Working Group – even when following on from a meeting of the Consortium. This afternoon there was just five of us doughty Compact Champions. Nevertheless, we made some good progress planning activities through the coming year – Compact’s tenth birthday.

With all the money being spent on the Compact Commission, I am surprised that Compacts are still entirely optional for local authorities. If a local authority decides not to engage with its voluntary sector, there is nothing anyone can do about it. Except the local electorate. Now there’s a thought …