Statutory peculiarities? My experience from within a local authority

In a former life, I headed the external funding team of a medium-sized local authority. Whilst I didn’t set out to make life difficult for VCFSE bodies (we called them “third sector” in those days), I fear that I may have. This is because the local authority was merely channelling government money and the micromanagement/reporting was somewhat absurd.

No one wanted to be victim of an untoward activity and producing something unexpected was viewed, on occasions, with horror. Initiative was almost discouraged (the phrase “risk averse” was common parlance) and, in a previous post, I was once castigated for achieving three years’ outcomes in less than a year. This is why I like the phrase "statutory peculiarities", in Anne Lythgoe’s article, very much indeed.

I thought that there might be scope to add a few other brief comments to the article. Hopefully Anne won’t mind. It really is an excellent article.

Firstly, there is a law of inverse effect where a grant of £100,000 to a church is worth more to them than a grant of £100,000 from the statutory awarding body. Here, I am thinking of Great British Energy – who have stated that they have £1bn for community buildings, which is a lot of money, yet, in the overall scheme of government spending, is not a lot at all.

What would £100,000 worth of PV installation do for your church energy bills? Could it connect into the grid? How are you involved in community energy schemes where electricity generated by your roof is used locally, by others. There is much investment into such schemes and, in a reverse of the process, it is possible to use surplus heat from data centres to heat community buildings. If this is a planning requirement for a data centre (or server farm), then how can you tap into that. If you can provide a solution for one issue, you may be asked to help on others – or at least provide a connection to another church, which has been identified as a better fit in terms of geography.

To enhance scope for a church to be a hub for a community energy scheme will require it to be part of the local Net Zero Group. In the "good old days" I have arranged for LEADER groups to meet in Churches – it opened group members’ eyes to what could happen in a church building and thus made grants so much easier to obtain. Currently there are some (deprived) areas of England which have access to a £20m pot over a 10-year period. The local church is an ideal venue for the neighbourhood groups to meet. It is seen as neutral and, whilst a warm welcome will be extended, a cool temperature may help a future funding bid.

And, on that matter, this is where the “peculiarities” come into play. A few quick tips:

• Ascertain what needs to be done by reading local plans and the funding criteria and then show how your project achieves that aim.
• Show the assessor that you “know your stuff” and have all technical reports in place. Currently I am working with a church which has submitted 143 pages of technical reports to support a £500,000 bid for heating. The statutory assessor has read them all and asked questions! (At that point I just brokered the conversations between experts!)
• Make sure that you can do the work and, at the very least, have supportive emails from those who give permission – even if they have not fully granted it. And, if permissions are needed as part of the application process, make sure that you have them. Others will have done this and they will get the money.
• Read the submission requirements. Check word counts and page limits. I still shudder at having to reject around 40 applications because there were too many pages. We had received well over 100 submissions and were oversubscribed six-fold. The first sift involved counting pages as we had too many submissions to read. I have no idea what was “lost” – it could have been 40 of the best solutions ever, but they were never read because of what seems a “peculiarity”.

There is much to say about statutory funding. Please let the Action Planning team know if there is an appetite for a webinar.