London Bangla A Force for the community…
A business-as-usual consultation on community grants has started in Tower Hamlets. Sadly, despite the cheerfulness of the Council’s press release, the consultation exercise misses the point.
What are community grants? Councils would say that they are funds they spend on community groups which deliver services. For example, the Council funds schools direct, but they could fund a community group to run a homework club. However, there are drawbacks to the grants system that have not been addressed in living memory.
Most Councils cannot meet financial demand for community group funding. Tower Hamlets Council, for example, has set a budget which can only fund around a quarter of applications. This leaves community groups fighting each other.
The competitive system favours the larger community groups which have experience in bidding for grants. They may even change the activities they want to deliver in order to meet application criteria. The system stops being responsive to local needs being met by community groups themselves and becomes a way of sustaining the larger, self-styled community groups that take charge of an area.
These groups are not accountable to the community in the way that the Council is. It’s not much, but if voters don’t like what elected politicians are doing, they can vote them out at the next election. The same voters can’t vote a large, grant-funded community group out: those groups are accountable to the Council, not the voters.
The mainstream Community Grants Programme (CGP) runs for three years, so in practice you only get one attempt at getting a grant during each Administration’s term in office. (That’s another factor that favours the larger organisations.) Tower Hamlets Council’s last programme was started in 2024 and is ends at the end of March 2027. The Council is now consulting about the next scheme it will put in place. They say this is a “blank piece of paper” consultation, during which they will collect ideas from Tower Hamlets residents before devising the next programme. They say they want to hear “what works well” so they can improve “what does not”. It is important that community groups which do not currently get funding feed into this consultation and don’t just leave it to the groups that do get funding.
The consultation runs from now until 19th September. There are three main ways in which you can be involved:
•filling in an online questionnaire
•visiting a pop-up engagement stall
•going to a workshop
Talking about how the Tower Hamlets cake should be divided up to meet local need is the sort of exercise a Council likes, but it is not much practical use to residents. Most of the online questionnaire focuses on getting you to say whether health is more important then employment skills, etc., but you an add new ideas. You could ask for community groups to receive more training in making grant applications to the Council and other bodies: that would bring more money into the borough, rather than leaving us to squabble over the crumbs from the cake.
●For more information, to do the online survey and see the dates and venues of the workshop sessions, go to:
CGP Consultation
●Read more about it:
Tower Hamlets runs summer clubs for kids
York Hall shuts – but Be Wells offer membership deals
