The Horsell's Mouth Politics, pedantry and personal interests

The News and Mail leads this week with a “fears are growing for the…” story on the Marjorie Richardson centre, which has understandably caused alarm. There is a paper on this going to the executive on September 3 that asks members to consider whether to re-instate funding to the centre on the basis of its current grant, £15,285 rather than the £20,000 it wanted.

There are, it has to be said, a couple of things that the story omitted, which is understandable because the newspaper needs to focus on the people rather than the background.

At Horsell Village Hall, we don’t rely on the council for funding, although it’s nice when it comes along. We have to do our own fundraising, balance our lettings books and seek grant funding from elsewhere. There is nothing preventing the centre from doing the same thing, so by turning down funding, the council is not “closing” the centre, it is merely saying that it cannot provide the funds it has done in the past.

The centre has now submitted a business plan – and not before time. Any operating model that relied so heavily on one source of income (WBC) is clearly in need of review. The plan shows that the centre is making £20k a year on sales as well as a £15k WBC grant but is spending more than £25k on management! This I would suggest, not WBC’s meanness, is the real problem – it’s a pity no-one at the News and Mail bothered to look it up.

In addition, the story tells us that 45-55 people each day use the centre – which is slightly at odds with the 433 a week in the grant application. However, if we multiply 50 by 5 and then 52 to get a rough yearly figure, it’s around 13,000. This seems to imply that with 15,500 visits for the year in 2007/8 (not people using the centre as the newspaper implies), we have roughly the same 50 people using the centre each day with a few extra here and there.

£20k, or for that matter £15k, is quite a bit of money to spend on – let’s be generous – 150-odd active individuals out of 92,000 residents in Woking. No-one likes to see the axe fall anywhere and taking funding away from community groups is not what Conservatism is about. But if you think that Horsell Village Hall received £3,500 for its 2,000 individual users, it does seem to introduce some perspective here.

My understanding is that the Marjorie Richardson Centre could be given time to make the new arrangements – ie a proper rather than pie-in-the-sky business plan – work. But users and staff blaming the council for the state it’s in, aiding by some unquestioning journalism, doesn’t paint it in the most favourable light.