Very short story

So... your funding dries up on Monday if you're one of the Hammersmith and Fulham voluntary sector groups that Hammersmith and Fulham Tory Council has targeted for funding cuts.

It's been six months since the council's cabinet voted to direct funding away from longstanding, left-leaning groups like the Hammersmith Community Law Centre and towards less bolshie organisations. (The Tory council claims that it's not cutting funding overall to the voluntary sector, but the Labour group begs to differ: they say funding drops significantly from October (ie Monday) and even more significantly in the 2008 to 2009 year, when projections are for an overall cut of more than 25%).

The legal action taken against the council by three people who've used voluntary sector services in Hammersmith and Fulham came to very little this week. The three aimed to argue that the council hadn't consulted properly about the cuts, or talked with the people who were going to be most affected. This seemed a likely argument - a fair few organisations heard about the proposed cuts to their funding on the grapevine, not through any formal council process.

In April, when the cabinet voted for the cuts, people like Helena Ismail from the Somali support group Horn of Africa, which lost all its funding, said they hadn't received as much as a phone call from the council about it. She found out when the Hammersmith Community Law Centre rang her and told her. The Hammersmith Community Law Centre only found out because one of its lawyers happened to see the council report that recommended the cuts.

Anyway, the judge this week ruled that the application for the hearing about the council's failure to consult with, or even talk to, the affected, was submitted out of time - very cute, says Law Centre Federation Chair John Fitzpatrick, when you remember that the main reason the application was delayed at all (if it was delayed - he still thinks it was within time) was that people gave the council the benefit of the doubt for a bit, and tried to keep talking with councillors and officers, to change their minds. They filed the hearing application when they started to see that talking to Tories wasn't particularly effective.

Fitzgerald hasn't seen the judge's full decision yet , but says it's all politics, anyway. 'I don't put faith in judges.' He couldn't see the court wanting to get involved in overturning poor local authority funding decisions: once they get into that, that's all they'll be doing. He says the voluntary sector won't give up, and will meet next week to decide where to go from here. He isn't sure how the Law Centre will handle its own funding cut of more than £100,000 from Monday. 'We're not looking at compulsory redundancies, but what we have been doing so far is not recruiting for vacancies. We would have to say that the service just will be reduced while this happens. We will have to say that.'