Tuesday, 4 September 2007

Sarah Pinnock (Watford Borough Council) and I spent the day in Cambridge learning about the East of England Development Agency’s Building Communities Fund and the Big Lottery Fund’s Community Assets Fund. Fascinating stuff.

The Building Communities Fund is £6m for the East of England region over two years and offers grants of £250,000 - £750,000 to groups wanting to buy premises for community purposes. Their focus is the sustainable economic impact of any project. One or two Watford groups might be interested.

The Community Assets Fund is £30m nationally and offers grants of up to £1m to refurbish properties that local authorities are in the process of transferring to community ownership. My guess is that Hertfordshire might end up with £500,000. The emphasis here seems to be very much on strategic change: transfers that will transform communities and the capacity of the local voluntary sector.

But the closing date for applications is only ten weeks away. This timescale hardly allows new transfer proposals to be developed. So most of the fund will probably be used to ease through transfers that were already in train. And long-standing transfer plans are hardly likely to reflect the latest policy directions of the Quirk Report and the Third Sector Strategy of the Department for Communities and Local Government.

On the return journey, Sarah and I had a long discussion about how best Watford should approach this opportunity. There are three options.

First, we could construct a bid around an existing planned transfer such as one of the five Community Centres already being transferred. Drawing up a bid will be a lot of work, and I don’t think it will really hit the right buttons as far as strategic change is concerned. But will any other local authority be better placed?

Secondly, we would identify an entirely new project or select one of those in the very earliest stages of incubation. There are a few of these sorts of projects, including the redevelopment of the Palace Theatre’s old scenery store and of the Hare Breaks Centre, but it is a vast amount of work to squash into ten weeks.

Thirdly, we can just do nothing and let the opportunity pass. After all, two key WBC officers are going to be on extended absence during the ten week development period.

What to do? My instinct is that if we are going to make a bid, we have to bite the bullet and go for option two. But is this feasible? Especially with the absence of two key WBC officers? Sarah and I agreed that there should probably be serious discussion of these three options and an early decision taken.

Foraging

In the garden, our tomatoes and peppers are struggling, but it is a bumper year for apples and (less welcome) for slugs. Jackie and I walked out into the woods and hedgerows foraging. We are too late for greengages and plums, which have already come and gone. But we gathered several pounds of blackberries, lots of elderberries and rosehips, and enough sloes for a bottle or two of sloe gin. Not a bad haul for a couple of hours walking.