The Building and Social Housing Foundation has produced a document laying out proposals for distributing the Community Grants Programme element of the £100million via a third-party intermediary rather than via the Homes and Community Agency or Communities and Local Government directly.
The report notes:
It appears that the appointment of an intermediary from the organisations in the government’s framework for civil society sector (aka third sector) grant fund administration is a strong option for the creation of a suitable mechanism, as this mechanism was established specifically for initiatives like this.
The organisations that have been appointed to fulfil this role are as follows:
- Big Lottery Fund
- Community Development Foundation
- PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP
- Russell Commission Implementation Body operating as 'v'
- Social Investment Business
- Tribal Education Ltd
We expect the government to select one of these to move the Community Grants Programme forwards.
In a particulaly helpful table, the document spells out in detail the issues small organisations would face, compared with Registered Providers, in accessing HCA funding and meeting HCA criteria .
Like the Empty Homes Network (in our letter to Andrew Stunell last January) the BSHF had originally proposed setting up a specialist team within the HCA to manage the distribution of the £100million to . But they have now identified that the pressure on the HCA to downsize and to become an "enabling body" makes it unable to fulfil the role of managing a demanding programme of grants to small organisations that should also encompass a significant element of facilitaton and capacity-building. The Empty Homes Network would agree with them. Since the £100m was announced as part of the Comprehensive Spending Review, and despite the efforts of individual people such as Gera Drymer, the HCA as an organisation has failed to demonstrate the appetite or capacity needed to take on a genuine enabling or leadership role around empty homes. This is hardly surprising given the background of massive cuts in its own revenue fundng.
The BSHF input is important and useful. The tragedy is that only a small percentage of the £100million will be allocated this way. The strong arguments put forwards by the BSHF for a "national facilitator" mirror exactly the proposals put forward by the EHN in its 2009 policy document
From empty promise to national action plan: Creating a national empty homes initiative which argued for the creation of an Empty Homes Unit to drive the empty homes agenda forwards.
You can download the BSHF proposals from
here.
