Croydon Labour are still playing a game of ‘smoke and mirrors’ with vital funding to groups who look after the most vulnerable in Croydon.
Q. When is a budget reduction not really a budget reduction?
A. When Croydon’s failing Labour Council take charge of the town’s finances.
In September this year the Labour Council came forward with an emergency budget that claimed to have found £27.9 million of savings this financial year.
However, when you take a closer look you discover this is not the case. In 2019 Cllr Hamida Ali, now Leader of the Council, proudly announced the Council’s new Community Fund. This fund was set to provide £2.6 million of annual support to voluntary sector groups who support the most vulnerable in our community.
After a lengthy and bureaucratic procurement process 59 groups won awards that guaranteed them funding from the Council up until 2023. These funds started being distributed into the charity’s accounts in March 2020.
In the Council’s emergency budget the £2.2 million of funding that still needs to be distributed to the voluntary sector in the 20/21 financial year has been moved from the Council’s General Fund into the Council’s Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) fund.
CIL funding comes from developers who wish to construct large buildings in the town. For the Council to receive this money they have to produce a document that sets out how much CIL money developers need to pay and how the Council will use the CIL money they receive.
Croydon Council produced their CIL document in 2019 which sets out how CIL money will be used:
The table above makes no mention of funding the voluntary sector using CIL money. Even if it is legal for the Labour Council to move money around in this way you can hardly pass it off as a saving, instead it is akin to moving the deck chairs around the Titanic.
Finally, what of the guarantee of funding from the Community Fund until 2023? I have already had it confirmed by Senior Officers at the Council that there are clauses in the three year contacts that the 59 voluntary groups have signed which will allow the Council to renege on that guarantee.
Even if voluntary sector groups continue to get funding from the Council this financial year the Medium Term Financial Strategy, presented to Cabinet in September, suggests that the Council will need to make a further £48 million of savings next year.
The future of the voluntary sector in Croydon looks bleak under this failing Labour Council.
