Agenda item

To consider the head of corporate strategy’s report. 

Capital Community Grants.

The committee considered the head of corporate strategy’s report. This set out details of four applications the council had received for capital community grants: requesting a total of £13,673. The report also set out the financial position, there being £44,024 remaining in the current year’s budget, which included £17,510 of unallocated funds and under spend carried forward from the previous financial year.

The committee considered each application, assessing it against the grants criteria and awarded grants as follows:

*The Committee requested that, for future rounds, the evaluations should include an organisation’s available funds in addition to the total assets.

Scheme’s Policy: non-agenda item.

After considering the applications, the committee decided to discuss the scheme’s policy and to make comments to the Cabinet member as follows:

·            More flexibility in the allocation of funds, to award more than 50 percent of project costs/ £5000, if needed and the money was available.

·            In the policy, under "Decision Making", to add an "s” to "committee" to change the wording to read: "grant applications will be determined by the relevant area committees".

·            In the policy, under “Opening and closing dates” to read: references to an election should be changed to DISTRICT elections.

·            The Abingdon Area Committee is granted less money per capita than other area committees, under the policy, and the committee would like the policy changed to redress the imbalance. They would like consideration to be taken of the fact that clubs and facilities in Abingdon attract users from out of the area, but the costs of maintenance etc are borne by Abingdon residents under the current policy.

·            The policy should contain an expectation that applicants will apply to their town or parish councils, and that a section on the application form, and the report to committee should contain an "if not, why not" question.

Additionally, the area committee asked officers for clarification on the schemes which area committees could initiate, and officers undertook to get this information back to the committee, as soon as possible.

The committee requested that the first round of applications in 2015/16 could open as early as possible after the elections, so that applicants would not need to wait an entire year between rounds: officers agreed to take this question away for consideration, and to respond as soon as possible.