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Tuesday 6 December 2011

Community First?

The Con Dem government has come up with a "Big Society" idea called Community First.  Apparently, money is available for pet schemes of David Cameron.

The idea is to give a small grant to a "community panel" who then divy out small grants to local groups for local projects.  All this is overseen by a local institution like a charity.  The great disadvantage of this scheme, which I understand has a very low take up rate, is that the charity is given no remuneration for overseeing the community panel.  Why should the charity or whatever spend a lot of time and effort administering such panels for nothing? Why should they expose themselves to the reputational risk if there is corruption or incompetence? 

It is curious that a party that believes so strongly in the profit motive should come up with a scheme that entirely ignores it.

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