Last week’s cuts to neighbourhood funding will stifle change

Posted by Ben Lee, NANM Director

Last Thursday CLG announced £1.6bn of in-year cuts to local government - representing a mammoth 25% share of the overall Treasury cuts of £6.2bn. Within this £50m will be cut from Working Neighbourhoods Fund and £125m from LAA performance reward grant. In the breakdown some local authorities are set to lose over £1million between now and March 2011 from these funding streams alone - see the full breakdown authority by authority.

CLG say they have focused on switching-off short term money rather than mainstream general grant to “ensure key frontline services can be protected and prevent council tax rises”. But the irony is that what has been cut is in fact the investment in more efficient, more user-focused, and often co-delivered services - in particular neighbourhood and community programmes which will bear the brunt of these cuts. The reality (like it or not) is that local government only really dabbles with ‘change’ through short-term grant funded projects. So in many areas these cuts will mean aborting the development of better alteratives to outdated, expensive, remote and top-down “key frontline services”.

We haven’t seen much debate about this so far - nor even seen much detail of how this is impacting locally. The NANM is urgently trying to gather detail of how these cuts are filtering through and which individual programmes are affected locally - let us know what you hear.