I couldn’t believe what I was hearing at the AGM of the community centre a couple of weeks ago.

There was some good news that the centre had attracted a corporate booking where some company had hired the whole place for a day for a significant fee. Having been a reluctant treasurer for the place for a year or two I know how important that can be to keep the books balanced and allow it to keep the hire charges down for all the regular users.

However, this seems to have gone to gone to the head of the current chair of the centre, our old friend and fabricator Alan Quirk. He was going on about re-naming the halls to make them sound more attractive to corporate clients. The example he gave was to call one of the halls something like ‘the Savoy suite’.

I thought that was bad enough, but he continued by suggesting that the whole centre could do with a new name. I think the implication is that having ‘Broadfield’ in the name is bad for business.

Maybe thats true. Maybe it would be easier to persuade companies to book rooms if the place had a twee name like a new housing development, but the thing is that the whole point of the Broadfield Community Centre is that its, well, the community centre for Broadfield.

I am 100% behind the aspiration to attract the odd lucrative booking to help subsidise the normal operations, but lets not lose sight of the real purpose of it. Since the two Council-run community centres in Broadfield were closed down its now the only one we have. Broadfield still scores highly on all the indices of deprivation, and it is essential that our community centre remains open to all and that everyone is made to feel welcome.

Hearing all this talk of re-branding I just heard echoes of Basil Fawlty and his “no riff-raff” advert for Fawlty Towers.

I could just about live with having the building re-named ‘Broadfield Village Hall’ just for the irony of it, and because its how I think of the place but to my mind it already has the ideal name – Broadfield Youth & Community Centre, and if that is too much of a mouthful then BYCC is already widely used.

The real danger, of course, is that winning the odd large booking and getting the odd extra grant will not enable the centre to expand its work, but will just be seen as an excuse to further reduce the Council’s grant. At the moment Crawley Borough Council is getting a real bargain: its grant to BYCC is a fraction of what it would cost it to run a community centre itself.

I have always felt that having to fight for the grant each year against all the other groups in town was wrong – as the centre is in effect providing a service which the council would have to provide otherwise it should have a guaranteed income, linked to SLAs if necessary. What makes it worse is that council grants are decided on the whims of councillors. I always felt uneasy about that, and kept pushing for a move to a less politicised grants mechanism even when I was a councillor and we were in charge. With the voluntary grants being one of the single largest items on the budget, and BYCC being one of the largest settlements, you do have to wonder how secure that funding really is and worry about the future of BYCC.

Of course the Citizens Advice have even more to worry about, having an even larger grant and being an even easier target. Its something to keep an eye on anyway.