After almost seven years, the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund in Bristol will come to a end in March 2008. As a consequence, the futures of many smaller voluntary and community-based projects are under threat and the disadvantaged areas of the city will suffer a significant setback.
Since 2001 the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund (NRF) has been awarded to the most deprived areas of England and Wales, including ten wards in Bristol, from Southmead and Henbury to Hartcliffe and Withywood. The funding has been coming to the city in order to reduce the gap between neighbourhoods. It has had been coordinated from central government on the principle that ‘by 2012 nobody should be disadvtanged because fo where they live’. This has been interpreted in many ways, of course, but ultimately in Bristol it has come to mean that the NRF has been emplotyed to ‘close the gap’ between affluent and disadvantaged neighbourhoods. And it has begun to make a difference.
Now, with the decision by Whitehall effectively to stop the fund, these very neighbourhoods may be about to experience a difficult time once again.
The details are these (sorry about the jargon). The recent comprehensive spending review (CSR), announced in October, indicated that the NRF would stop anyway next year, but would be replaced by the Working Neighbourhoods fund (WNF), a new scheme that would be focused very much on tackling depirvation through reducing worklessness. The NRF had been awarded to Bristol owing to the concentration in the city of areas of significant deprivation, among the 10% most deprived in the country. The funding was used to address this deprivation, providing valuable support and resources for a wide range of projects from the public and ‘third’ sector. In the end — i.e. currently and until the end of March 2008 — this has meant around £7m coming to the city each year. The underlying principle of NR has always been to ensure that the funding it brought should be used to ‘pump prime’ community renewal. It has never been intended as a permanent feature of the urban landscape. This was referred to as ‘mainstreaming’. Mainstreamed projects would ultimately be incorporated into mainstream public service provision and would therefore become a more sustainable element in the life of the city. It is arguable, but for many people this mainstreaming has not happened sufficiently, and is now causing a number of crows to come hoem to roost.
The end of NRF was always expected. But what has surprised and shocked so many in Bristol (especially the third sector organisations) is that it will not be replaced with the Workign Neighbourhoods Fund. The WNF is being allocated to the top (i.e. bottom) sixty-six of local authorities across the country. Bristol comes in sixty-eighth and so misses out. Instead we will receive £3.7m this year, £1.4 next year and nothign the following year. This is referred to as a ‘transitional’ arrangement, intended to assist Bristol in having to adjust to life without NRF. This would be all well and good if the mainstreaming had been achieved. But it hasn’t. Projects receiving NRF are in general not sufficiently robust to get past this crisis, and are therefore in the unhappy situation of having to make plans to end their renewal projects in the certain knowledge that the job is far from done. Added to this, of course, highly experience and skilled community workers will be already looking for alternative employment which will leave already vulnerable projects even weaker.
There are a number of options before us, therefore. Should we now could agonise for many weeks on how we got into this crisis, why the funding has been cut in what seems an unfair manner, and why the NRF funded projects are not sustainable? Or should we get on with sorting out which projects do get a share of the £3.7m for 2008/9 and try to salvage some of their work?
I would argue that we need to do both.
We need to face up to the fact that the pot has suddenly become a whole lot smaller, and therefore need to choose very carefully which projects should be given the last chance, and which the last rites. Choosing must be open, accountable, transparent, participatory and ultimately based on which projects will lead to the greatest renewal. Even these successful projects need to be told very clearly that there is nothing more after this.
And we also need to challenge the decision to cut the fund. It may seem like a task for St Jude, but it is easy to settle back and wallow in the misery, but we should not firget that the reason Bristol is not getting any WNF is that someone somewhere has decreed that the worst sixty-six authorities will receive the money, not the sixty-seventh or sixty-eighth (Bristol). Why sixty-sixth? NRF was awarded to the worst eighty-eight. What is the rationale? In all probability the rationale is easily explained, and we will simply have to get on with life with signficantly less funds in poorer neighbourhoods. But the question needs to be asked if only for the sake of grieving over the loss. It is, after all, a surprise to everyone in the city.
One final point. It may well be that Bristol has had its funding cut because in the view of those who allocate it we are no longer a city in need. In which case, we could view this as a success: Bristol has moved down the deprivation tables. It’s a bit contrived perhaps. But maybe it is the best way to proceed
May 22nd, 2008 at 5:44 pm
It does seem like an arbitrary number to have plucked out doesn’t it - the worst 66 authorities. I realise this was written 5 months ago and I’m concerned this has gone largely un-noticed by the news and Press in Bristol.
I myself have only recently been made aware of NRF and that it seemed to be making a difference to people in Bristol.
Has the decision to pull funding been contested? I’d be really interested to hear the latest on the situation.
Thanks