One of the consequences of Croydon's Labour administration taking the Council into bankruptcy is the loss of Community Ward Budgets that each councillor gets to use on local good courses. In the past I have used it to help fund St Edmunds Church projects, the Neighbourhood Watch, to provide funding for disabled tennis players coaching at Purley Bury Tennis Club and to help put a new roof on the Scout Hut.
In terms of size of spend by the Council the CWB is relatively small. The fund amounts to £8,000 per councillor or £560,000 total budget, but that is just 1.5% of the reported £36m Brick by Brick has failed to pay back to the Council as the company owners or 0.26% of the £214m the Council has leant to Brick by Brick for a so far 0 return.
Now though, the bankruptcy has meant this funding has been immediately stopped and all pending payments cancelled. One of the projects cancelled that I had agreed to help fund and which has now lost that funding was a mentoring and tutoring programme called Bar School Buddies. This programme is run by a very industrious and inspirational Barrister and Croydon resident who has recently qualified and wants to encourage the next generation of advocates by running his mentoring programmes in schools, including Harris Purley, for students interested in a legal career. The programme was run during the 2019/20 academic year and the intention was to run it again this year.
I hope Bar School Buddies can still happen as a project to develop professional skills and interest amongst our young people in Croydon. It is just a shame that projects such as this, together with local charities and good causes that really need only small amounts of funding to progress, are being stopped by the failure of Labour to run our Council in a financially responsible manner. After all, in terms of scale, the CWB remains only a small pot of Council money but a valuable one to the small organisations who ask for funding.
