We have had a major victory in our campaign against the waste of tax payers' money by the proposals for the succession strategy for Kensington Regeneration.
We have passed a resolution at the recent City and North Liverpool District Committee insisting that the new CIC company must
1. Increase its standard membership considerably - 70 out of 14500 residents is not enough
2. Break even within 3 years - so the expensive new manager must excel at fundraising otherwise the arrangement may well be called in
3. The directors must receive no remuneration - I think it might have been a LibDem who proposed this
The legal eagles at LCC will now incorporate these into the legal agreement with the New Deal partnership.
So, although the waste will go on, hopefuly it will be curtailed by our actions.
Thanks must go to Nick Small, Louise Ellman MP, Jane Kennedy MP, John Denham, Minister of State and the entire membership of the district committee for getting behind our campaign to ensure that as much money as possible should be spent on local priorities and not on needless bureacracies.
2 comments:
Louise, far from being a "major victory" as you state, the resolution passed at the last meeting of the District Committee [in the name of Nick Small] actually reiterated the current agreed position of the Board of the Kensington CIC. This includes increasing the size of the membership and having a contractual obligation to cover the administrative costs after three years. I don't know what you mean by "break even" as the legacy funding is guaranteed as part of the legal partnership conditions with LCC. Indeed, Nick Small agreed to include my amendment to incorporate sustainablity for both "administrative and ancilliary services". There will be no short fall as you imply, even from the external sources. The issue over renumeration is quite straightforward. It was never asked to be included by the Board and Nick Small [not a Lib Dem] only referred to it by reference at the end of the debate and it wasn't actually included in his written Emergency Motion.
I'm surprised that you referred to John Denham [Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government] because I used his recent paper on Connecting Communities to support his belief in giving local people a real say in how their want their own communities to develop - particularly without political interference. This was why your arguments in favour of using the legacy funding through the Kensington WNF/CCIF collapsed and the participatory budgeting model was brought in to replace it. It was a decent attempt to move the goalposts but didn't last long. That's why the Kensington Succession Strategy was passed unanimously at both Executive Board and by the Kensington residents at the recent AGM.
I often wonder if Laurence Sidorczuk knows what day it is.
If the City Council incorporates my motion in the legal agreement with the CIC board, it will make the CIC more accountable to the City Council and the local community. The Lib Dems, Kensington Regeneration and the CIC board (which Laurence sits on) have failed to do this. If it’s implemented, there will be minimum targets for the CIC’s membership, there will be less waste of taxpayers’ money and the CIC directors will be stopped from paying themselves salaries (and yes this was included in the motion which Laurence voted for it). To say that this was already the position of the CIC is laughable, but if that's what Laurence is saying, will he now committ the CIC board to endorse those principles?
I’m still not happy with the Succession Strategy and have yet to meet one of my constituents who supports it, but at least now some of the worst aspects can be dealt with.
Cllr Nick Small
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