Caring for your carers

October 13, 2009 — admin
Woking Hospice

Woking Hospice

It’s a very tough time to be a charity. With the onset of recession comes a fall in donations and bequests and cuts in other sources of funding. In the case of Woking Hospice, the situation is now so serious that respite day centre services have been suspended (day centre medical services continue).

The Woking News and Mail has begun a campaign to try and encourage donations, which is a good start. The hospice is essentially a community facility – it gets a staggeringly small level of support from the NHS – and the financial solutions to its problems will be found within Woking rather than elsewhere.

Since April, Woking Hospice has been in talks with Woking Borough Council about financial support that the council can offer. While the council should not as a general rule be the bank of last resort, there are clearly some exception to this where the benefit to the borough is so overwhelming as to be reckless if ignored.

Woking Hospice is one such case and it is an institution of such value to Woking and its people that £60,000 to fund home-based palliative care is something that I believe the executive will support readily on Thursday evening. There are, however, one or two caveats borne out from the same economic circumstances that affect the hospice in the first instance.

Firstly, an organisation receiving a significant amount of money – in the case of the hospice more than £200,000 across three years – to fund its objectives (however unquestionably worthy) has a responsibility to taxpayers to engage in the process of reviewing its business. In this case, it shouldn’t be a condition but I would like to see Woking Hospice engage in this by bringing forward a business plan to demonstrate how during leaner times it can continue to fund its core services and how financial support can be best targetted to help it.

Secondly, the money for 2010/11 to 2012/13 needs to come out of the grants budget and currently the borough cannot afford to increase this. So we need to ask difficult questions about which other organisations will have to sacrifice money in order for the hospice to receive it.

I’m tempted to point out that the hospice needs £300,000 to maintain its core activities while Woking Borough Council gives nearly £400,000 a year to The Lightbox. But I’ve raised this question before to broad opprobrium so I won’t do so again.

What I will say is that we need to ensure the council’s resources are targetted on those that need them most.

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An unholy row

September 3, 2009 — simonashall

Further to my previous post, the executive has made its decision – to refuse the URC, to pass St Mary’s over to county councillor Geoff Marlow for consideration out of his Surrey members’ allowance and to give St Paul’s, Maybury, £30,000.

The executive members I think have made a sensible decision – the URC bid was just nonsense and the St Mary’s one, while worthy, is something the church should be doing anyway and has had 10 years to plan for. St Paul’s is a truly good scheme with great community benefit and probably deserved £50,000.

But some of the scenes in the chamber were a bit unsavoury. The Lib Dems tutting about grants refused and people getting tribal about churches in “their” ward – or even their churches. There is no place in the council chamber for this kind of contemptuous attitude or religious persuasion.

My own feeling is that the council should put a stop to all applications from churches as part of the community grants scheme. All the churches are wealthy enough to be able to fund their own business and the agrandisement of their own facilities.

If we are to consider exceptional schemes that clearly have an overwhelming and valuable community benefit, they should be brought forward separately – with no obligation for them to get to council – as part of delivering the council’s community strategy.

We shouldn’t be in the business of subsidising church efforts to secure future generations of worshippers. That isn’t what the council tax should be used for.

Update 4/4/09: I find myself in agreement with Cllr Denzil Coulson. Just fancy that!

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Tale of two churches

September 2, 2009 — simonashall

On Thursday evening, a number of churches are applying to Woking Borough Council for grants from the community fund. I am pretty uneasy about taxpayers subsidising a religious organisation of any kind, simply because by the very nature of the organisation, a large proportion of the population will never see the benefit of that investment.

Two of the applications, though serve as a perfect contrast to my mind of what should and should not get our money. St Mary’s Church in Byfleet has put in an application for £5,000 towards provide new disabled toilets. The work involves clearing out a cleaning cupboard and installing drainage and a disabled toilet facility.

£5,000 seems like quite a bit for this work but the council will only provide half anyway. The application by the church will bring it into line with the Disability Discrimination Act and also includes future plans to provide a sports/community facility for the area. I hope the organisation gets the money it wants.

On the other hand, the United Reformed Church in White Rose Lane is after £100,000 towards a £2million scheme it wants to put in place to

“open up the premises, making them more welcoming and accessible; providing
top-quality facilities for all users, seeking to ensure the church becomes a
focal point for community life and activity; rejuvenating and updating the
entire site; providing space for quiet reflection; providing more space for the
growing youth and children’s work…”

I cannot see where the benefit to the wider community is here – only to the current and future congregation and it is not the council’s job to help the church increase that.

There is reference here only to improving what’s already there for the benefit of churchgoers and those who want “quiet reflection” ie prayer. And the reference to children’s work doesn’t cut it either – why on earth or heaven should the taxpayer foot the bill for to help the URC secure its next generation of followers and funders?

In March, the executive turned down a request for £50,000. The officers have brought it back again at £20,000 using the “Lisbon Treaty” version of decision-making. No doubt if £20,000 is refused it will come back next year for £10,000. This isn’t a good use of Woking residents’ money – I hope the executive kicks out the URC application once and for all.

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Marjorie Richardson dilemma

August 28, 2009 — simonashall

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.

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