It was a good meeting though.  Stuffed with Tories of course, but that doesn’t really matter.  When it comes to the community centre I think we are all on the same side.  Even teh complaints about the council being stingy with grants is not a party political point.  It may have been Labour party members complaining about a Tory council, but we all know it was the same when it was a Labour council.

The problem really is that the decision on grants is made by a panel of councillors who are, by definition not from Broadfield (all our councillors would be on the governing body of the centre and thus have to declare an interest).   I think there is a feeling that the community centre is some sort of extra facility we have and the councillors always scale down the application accordingly.  They do know differently, but the decision is based on feelings I suspect.   The reality is that our centre provides a service that would have to be provided by the borough council if it didn’t exist, and it would cost a lot more than the full grant applied for to do that.

Its an old problem that I remember well from my short spell as treasurer for the centre, and it doesn’t look like being solved any time soon.  My own preference for having grant allocation decisions taken away from councillors, who have a track record of Quixotic decisions, is never going to happen. The other possibility, of turning the community centre into a service provider, with an SLA and more secure, longer-term funding stands more of a chance, but has its own risks.

The amazing thing is, as Jayne pointed out, that every year the amount applied for is lower and still gets scaled down, and yet still the centre manages to somehow break even.

Figuring out the fire alarms there can be an interesting bit of problem-solving.  Today it was somebody from a church group who did all the right things to shut off the alarm but it kept showing an alarm in zone 2 – the social hall.   The break-glass thingy next to one fire exit was intact.  Next to the other fire exit is a push-glass thingy.  I dismantled that and it looked fine, so I put it back together again.  Still the alarms would not turn off, so we looked at the smoke detectors and then, in desperation we looked everywhere.

We even looked in the cupboard in case there was an alarm point there, which would be silly – and found one in there!   Back in the mists of time, before various bits of building the cupboard was not a cupboard and had a fire exit, which is now sealed up, and thus a break-glass thingy, with its glass broken.

It turned out that the church group had broken it while putting their gear away, and the offending item was a wooden cross.  I guess that makes it an act of God…

I asked one of our network support people at work if he would help out and he came along and waved his magic IT wand over everything.  My mistake was in trying to network the computers together – he just turned off DHCP on the printer, set its IP address to something high in the range the centre uses and used TCP/IP printing on it.

I'm more than a little rusty with all that stuff.  I think I would have cocked up the subnet mask if I had tried that myself, so three cheers for James for sorting it all out.

I tried again yesterday and it was still out. A nice reminder that if I did ditch Virgin for BT I would not necessarily be any happier.

It was all Jayne’s idea. She decided it would be a good idea to have an auction at the Broadfield Community Centre fete last month, so people were bidding for someone with gardening skills to come and do a few hours in their garden, or for someone who is a hairdresser to do some hairdressing.

I was press-ganged into being sold off as a computer expert and someone bid money for me to go and sort out problems with their computer. I think the deal was that they bid the sort of amount I could earn at work in about half an hour, and in return I would give up several hours of my free time, and the money would swell the Community Centre coffers. As it was in a good cause, and because Jayne is not someone who takes no for an answer, I went along with it.

The trouble is that this was the day before we went on holiday. I gave my new owner one of my cards and told them to give it a week or so before calling. They said not to worry, I should just call when I was back and available. Fine. They had given their details to one of the volunteers so I could get their phone number later.

We came back from holiday, I went to get the phone number so I could discharge my obligation, but the scrap of paper has gone missing… I can remember what the people look like and know what road they live in, but thats not quite good enough.

So if you have bid for some IT consultancy from someone who is frankly a bit rusty in that field and have been sitting by the phone for a month, waiting for it to ring, do get in touch.

Not only that, but they had the full support of their local management who, I believe, chipped in with some supplies. They are going to come back to do some clearing up of the gardens and say they will pop back every month or so to keep the grounds tidy. I hear that Homebase has been persuaded to donate some plants as well.

I can remember from my brief time as treasurer at the community centre that paying for gardeners was quite expensive. With the steady reduction in grants over the last few years the centre has had to do away with that and it really shows – the gardens have been getting tatty – so its great to see all this volunteering activity ramping up to fill the gaps, and its another reminder that the world is not all black and white but has various shades of grey: even big, bad multinational banks now have corporate social responsibility policies.

It sometimes sounds like a load of jargon, but it can make a big difference to some charities to have a team of helpers come in like that. As soon as they get the place bright and shiny we will have to persuade them to start booking rooms for meetings!

The story is about the funding of the Broadfield Youth and Community Centre, and how the council’s grant is, yet again, lower than what was applied for and lower than the previous year. I can remember how it was always the same when I was treasurer for the place so I can understand how everyone associated with the place feels about it.

Broadfield North councillor Adam G Brown (Con) says about it:

Broadfield is a deprived area and the community centre is one of the few places in the neighbourhood which brings people together.

And I can’t argue with that, though I reckon things will get worse before they get better – if they ever do, thanks to his party’s fixation on low council tax. When they come to setting their budgets I have always predicted that grants to voluntary organisations is likely to be a soft target for cuts, and during the election the Tories got very upset when I suggested the areas they might look to save money – even if they were only the same areas where they suggested cuts would occur if the transfer of council housing failed to take place.

Anyway, Adam is not going to change his party’s general direction, but there is something he can do: start pushing for BYCC to be removed from the voluntary grants system, along with a couple of other strategically important recipients like the CAB. He could also try to get the whole distribution of voluntary grants removed from councillors’ hands.

There is little chance of success – I know because I tried both myself – but both measures are even more important now that the overall fund for grants is at risk. The community centre should have a budget ring-fenced from other organisations and tied to a service level agreement.

But it was not Adam who got me annoyed in this story, it was Janet Treagus, the council’s spokeswoman (actually a press officer who provides quotes on everything) who said:

We don’t expect to fund everything a voluntary organisation does. They have to raise some funds themselves.

But hold on. In every other neighbourhood of the town the council provides community centres, which the council funds without looking for donations, sponsorship and other fundraising. If the BYCC did not exist, Crawley Borough Council would have to provide a community centre, and it would cost a lot more than the £24,486 which was given in a grant, and would be a much worse service as it would not provide a full-time centre manager to deal with the public.

So don’t give us all that bollocks about it being a charity as if it is something optional and in addition to council-provided services: it is a facility provided by the local churches, supported by individuals within Broadfield to provide a service on behalf of the council.

Yesterday I had a little note tacked onto a meeting notice for the CCAR committee, saying that there was a ‘Multi-cultural celebration’ at Christ the Lord church in Broadfield and CCAR committee members were invited. No more information than that. The Broadfield church is shared between the Anglicans, the Catholics and the Free Church so it could have been organised by any or all of them.

It turned out to be a Roman Catholic event, part of a series of special events they are holding this month, but turned out not to be too church-y. It started with a song sung first in English, then French, Portugese, Japanese (I think), Spanish and Irish, then there was a short reading, a song in Japanese and a couple of songs from a quite impressive Mauritian choir.

Afterwards everyone went into the main hall of the community centre where there was a sort of global village. All around teh edges of the hall were stalls, each themed for a country with some information about that country and food from it. Unfortunately I had filledup on bacon and tomato sandwiches before going out so didn’t feel like anything else, but there was food from England, Ireland, Jamaica, India, Gambia, Poland, Germany/Zimbabwe, Austria, Italy, Japan, Nigeria and lots of other places. Local playgroups had been involved in producing posters, so the event had involved a lot of different people before it even started.

Jayne has been thinking about organising something similar for ages, and now she is back on the council of the community centre she was ready to suggest it again. I hope she does: it was a great display, and the food looked fantastic. Who cares if someone has already done it?

My mind wandered a bit during the event. It often does. When the Mauritian kids were singing I felt quite moved. Their families have come here, not always by choice, and are not totally adopting our culture nor staying apart in their own, but are joining in with an established organisation and adding some of their own flavour to it – and British churches can do with some lively, infectious singing.

Although I’m an atheist myself I have been to my share of church services. The very English ones in the Sussex villages were always very dull and serious. Nobody ever looked like they were happy to be there, they seemed to be there out of social obligation rather than religious feelings – I was as well, but I’m happy to admit it. To be fair, I don’t get the same feeling at the Broadfield Church. Not only does everyone seem to be into it, but they look happy too.

I just thought it was a great example of our own culture being improved by newcomers. No doubt it is exactly the sort of thing the BNP would frown on as it is not harking back to a mythical past but looking forward, but I enjoyed seeing the Mauritians cheering everyone up.

I was also amazed, as I always am, by the sheer diversity of Crawley’s population now. Even within the Catholic church there were Indians and Pakistanis in their national costumes, but belonging to the RCs.

I do not have a very high opinion of religion in principle, but that is judging religions by their leaders and by their bureaucracies and by their wider politics – which is all I see of them most weeks and that is via the media. Whenever I join in with the actual members of local churches it is a different story. Its not their fault that the leaders and career clerics at the higher echelons are protecting kiddie-fiddlers or allowing the spread of AIDS by not relaxing rules on condom use any more than its my fault that my party’s leadership have invaded Iraq, decided to renew Trident or sold weapons to be used in East Timor.

Best of all, nobody at the local churches even thinks of trying to convert me…

The venue is the Holy Trinity School 6th form centre, Buckswood Drive, Gossops Green.

There is a slight whiff of futility about these meetings because the committee has very few powers to make decisions: it can only make recommendations or comments for the whole council to take into consideration when making the actual decisions. Added to that, the county council is Tory-dominated but the West Crawley Committee is 100% Labour – I think it is the only one in the county with more than one Labour member, as nearly all the Labour county councillors represent divisions in the West of Crawley.

Having said that, the committees were set up to solicit opinions and there is a chance that recommendations from it will be taken into account, especially if they are backed up by public opinion. Some of the agenda could be heavy going, but there are some important issues which are of particular interest to residents of this area.

The way I look at it, the county council have made an effort to set these meetings up in Crawley instead of being out of sight in Chichester, so the least we can do is try and turn up. If I did not have a previously-arranged piss-up to host I would be there myself.

Topics like the fire station, hot school meals, grant applications and the transport/highways works programmes should provide enough interest for the public, and I hope that the local papers will send someone along too. If nothing else, it is always good to see Ralph Wright from the highways department in action – he really should have been a politician instead of an officer.

The last one of these meetings I went to had very few members of the public in attendance, unless you count about 20 borough councillors. Lets see if we can get a few more this time around.

Items on the agenda include:

Update

Developments since the last meeting, including the Northern area bookbus, the fire station, and hot school meals. Only 10 minutes is allocated to this, so expect a basic update and not a major discussion.

Public Questions

Any questions – although there is a request that anyone with complex questions should submit them before the meeting to allow them to give a more substantive answer.

Highways and transport works programme

This is all about a report on the programme of works for the next two years. The committee is to respond to the report. (The actual schedule is in an appendix to the report)

Community grants

Another report, this time about applications received for community grants.
Applications have been received from:

• Chestnut Tree House
• Crawley CVS
• Crawley Audio News
• 2nd Ifield St Margaret’s Scouts
• Broadfield Youth & Community Centre
• CTL Anglican Church
• The Happy Hut Care Group

The committee will be considering each of these applications, and I think this is the bit where they actually can make a decision. The committee has a budget of £20,000 which can be allocated. Applications total £18,160 plus “a contribution” for the scouts, so they should all be OK, but I don’t know if they intend to hold onto anything for contingencies.

Minerals & waste development framework

Yet another report, this time about public consultation on the draft minerals and waste core strategy and strategic waste site allocations.

General information on county local committees can be found here, including full agendas, answers to frequently asked questions, and contact details for anyone who wants to know even more.

On the face of it a reasonable question, but I have not been involved in the BYCC for a couple of years, and don’t really keep up with all the comings and goings.

It will be interesting to see what the paper writes, if anything. I don’t know if they were expecting any juicy gossip or hints of scandal but, unfortunately, the resignation was quite straightforward and much as I dislike the bloke personally and for his politics I couldn’t be bothered to make up any juicy gossip about Alan Quirk, tempting though it was.

The truth is that following the Tories taking control of the council in May, Alan was, contrary to all common sense, elevated to an executive position. His portfolio (community engagement) includes responsibility for grants to the voluntary sector and the BYCC, which he was chairing, depends on one of those grants for its continuing existence. Obviously that promotion created a conflict of interests and one of the jobs had to go.

All very boring, but I still have a few questions knocking around in my head like: as Quirk must have resigned from the BYCC in June or July why is it suddenly newsworthy? Since when has the Broadfield community centre’s internal politics been at all newsworthy? Why do the papers keep phoning me but never leave a comment on here to say hello? Where did my DVD of Family Guy series one get to?

Sorry.. my mind wanders sometimes.

Just don’t get me started on why anybody on the council still has any responsibility for how grants are apportioned. Even while I was still a politician I was trying to get that decision taken out of the politicians’ hands – after sitting on a grants appeals panel and seeing the arbitrary nature of the discussions, and seeing the officers prepare huge reports on the pros and cons of a particular application only to see decisions made on a whim. Its a debate I tried to start but nobody else wanted to have.