funding cuts

Introduction:

Hammersmith and Fulham's Conservative council is planning to cut funding to a mighty range of longstanding local voluntary groups. That’s no big surprise from a Conservative council, although it was certainly delivered as one. Some groups have only just heard that they’re about to lose their funding, and mostly, they’ve heard it from each other. The council has not been too quick to let these applicants know that their money has gone.

The worst hit by far is the Hammersmith Law Centre – a longstanding charitable organisation that has been providing Hammersmith’s community and voluntary sectors with advantageous legal advice since 1979, and tormenting various council kaisers for about as long. The Law Centre is staffed by 12 lawyers - 12 experienced persons who know the law, continue to set national legal precedents with their work, give free legal advice to charities, unions, right-minded council officers and anybody else who suspects that the council or government office that they’re having to deal with is talking neocon garbage. It is perhaps needless to say that the Law Centre poses a problem for the council.

And so it is that the Law Centre is due to lose 60% of its funding. The Tories will try to point out (as their officer report on voluntary sector funding to the council’s Cabinet on Monday 16 April does, all over the place) that they are not cutting funding to the voluntary sector as such – they are merely redistributing it. Alas for council leader Stephen Greenhalgh, it is hard to mask this sort of surgery. The truth is that if you get rid of the Hammersmith Law Centre, you lobotomise the community and voluntary sector in Hammersmith and Fulham. You don’t need a lot of brain to get it around that one.

We will be looking at this issue in more depth over the coming weeks and talking to more of the people who are affected. This first story begins the discussion.

Note: voluntary groups affected by the proposed funding cuts will hold a protest at a Hammersmith and Fulham council cabinet meeting on Monday 16 April at 7pm in the Assembly Hall in the Town Hall on Kings Street in Hammersmith. This is a public meeting, and the affected voluntary groups would welcome support.

Hammersmith Law Centre

The Hammersmith Law Centre discovered that it was about to lose 60% of its funding not long before Easter. Staff there appear to have found out about on the day that long-time centre lawyer Tony Pullen just happened to see the council report that recommended the cut.

The centre is on the mailing list for Hammersmith and Fulham council agendas, and the agenda for the April 16 2007 cabinet meeting had come through the door, as the council agendas usually do. Pullen decided to thumb through the agenda - mostly, it seems, for the hell of it. He noticed that there was a report in the agenda called 'Voluntary Sector Funding, 2007 to 2009.' 'I thought 'that looks interesting,' Pullen says, raising his eyebrows.

Indeed it was. The report, which is still due to go before the Monday 16 April Cabinet meeting, recommended a £159,000 cut to the Centre's annual £261,000 grant – the most substantial in a list of very substantial hits. Pullen found himself a little flustered. 'We hadn't had any warning, and we hadn't heard anything from the council. This report was saying that we were going to lose 60% of our funding, and the cabinet meeting (where a vote would be taken on that recommendation) was only a few days away when I saw that report. I don't know how we would have found out if I hadn't seen that report.'