MPs examine Community Fund grant-giving

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By Boni Sones

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Richard Buxton, the Community Fund’s chief executive, is to have further talks with the All Party Parliamentary Group on Poverty, in the wake of a presentation to the group on 2 July. The chair of the group, Ernie Ross MP (Dundee West, Labour) had invited Mr Buxton, Diana Brittan (CF Chair) and Professor Mike Coombes of Newcastle University to present the findings of the CF-commissioned ‘CURDS research’ (see box opposite).

Professor Coombes told the group that the research – mapping sources of funding for community groups in areas of poverty – was ‘unique’. In his presentation to the MPs, he emphasised just how important the collection of this kind of data is. In the question and answer session that followed, MPs were particularly interested in the ‘regional atlases’ that the CURDS team had prepared for them.

There are regional atlases for each of the nine English regions. The atlases give a regional breakdown of funding to disadvantaged communities from the CF, trusts and foundations, the European Social Fund, the Single Regeneration Budget and Whitehall departments. Ernie Ross told the CF: ‘The All Party Parliamentary Group on Poverty made it clear from the start that it wanted to listen to first-hand accounts of those living in poverty; this is a forum where ministers and MPs listen to people – they are more important than the MPs. So far as lottery money is concerned, we have to ask ourselves if those people living in poor communities are getting what they are entitled to. This has been a very interesting presentation.’ Expressing his keenness for further discussion, he invited the CF for a further meeting. 

Boni Sones is an adviser to the Community Fund

The Community Fund commissioned research from Newcastle University’s Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies (CURDS) in 1998 to find out where disadvantaged communities were getting their funding from. By comparing the patterns of funding from different sources with different levels of deprivation in each part of England, the CF hoped to learn more about how effective its work was. CURDS surveyed 3,500 grant-making bodies. The study was carried out for two years, 1998 and 2000. It covered the lottery, trusts and foundations, European Social Fund, Single Regeneration Budget and Whitehall departments.
The CF is providing around one-third of the voluntary and community sector’s funding for innovative projects that tackle deprivation within disadvantaged communities. The research excluded local authority funding as no accurate data is available.