Mark Isherwood
Shadow Minister for Communities, Housing and Local Government, Mark Isherwood AM, has called on the Welsh Government to ensure that funding for Communities First, the Welsh Government’s re-vamped Tackling Poverty Programme, is allocated according to the priorities identified by people within the Communities First areas themselves.
Following Wales Audit Office Reports during the last Assembly highlighting the Welsh Government’s failure to ensure effective corporate governance controls in Communities First ‘Grant Recipient Bodies’, the Welsh Government has now handed the ‘Grant Recipient Body’ function in most Communities First areas to Local Authorities.
Questioning the First Minister in the Chamber this week, Mr Isherwood said:
“The Welsh Government’s main anti-poverty strategy is Communities First. Following the Wales Audit Office’s concerns in reports during the last Assembly on the lack of effective corporate governance embedded in Grant Recipient Bodies outside Local Government, the Welsh Government has now made most of the Grant Recipient Bodies Local Authorities.
“How, therefore, is the Welsh Government ensuring that those Local Authorities, while fulfilling the Grant Recipient Body role in terms of financial and human resource management and audit, nonetheless ensure that the funding is focused on anti-poverty strategies that the local community has identified and is working with it on?
The First Minister replied: “We have sought to ensure that the money is made available and spent in an appropriate way, but the whole point of Communities First is to ensure that projects come up rather than being forced down and, of course, to ensure that people are fully engaged in what they believe will be the most effective projects to tackle poverty in their own areas.”
Mr Isherwood added: “The Wales Audit Office reports in the last Assembly on both the Communities First Programme and Plas Madoc Communities First, which I called for, identified the problems caused by Welsh Government failure to put proper corporate governance in place for the bodies receiving public money for programme delivery with Communities First partnerships.
“The problem was always this failure rather than the nature of the bodies themselves. Despite allegations that a Local Authority already acting as a Grant Recipient Body had steered money away to its own projects, the Welsh Government decided to put funding for almost all its revised Communities First areas through local authorities.”
