10.07.13
£4.3m extension to Community Budgets
Neighbourhood Community Budget Pilots will be extended to a further 100 areas, the DCLG has announced. The £4.3m funding is in addition to a £350,000 boost to the existing 12 pilots to help speed up their programmes.
The Our Place! Programme will also establish a network of champions from the pilot areas to give peer to peer support to communities.
Communities’ minister, Don Foster said: “This further investment will help build a popular movement towards of a new way of working.
“Handing control of local public services over to local communities who know their areas best can deliver more and better for less help create more resilient and involved communities and build neighbourhoods that are better places to live.”
Sir Merrick Cockell, chairman of the Local Government Association: “Neighbourhood Community Budgets are an important part of the drive to take power out of Whitehall and place in the hands of people and communities.
“A cornerstone of this process must be ensuring that new structures are still subjected to appropriate democratic oversight and accountability at a local level. This process of rewiring services around the people who use them should be emulated across the whole of the public sector.”
Neighbourhood Community Budgets were discussed at last week’s LGA conference: there will be full coverage in the July/August edition of PSE.
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