Third sector gives council a tough fund balancing act​​​​​​​ - Iain Whyte

The Ripple Project tackles poverty and inequality in Restalrig, Lochend and Craigentinny.

In Craigentinny and Duddingston the most obvious is the Ripple Project but the range spans Edinburgh’s different demographics as shown by the Eric Liddell Community in Morningside and Pilton Equalities Project to name just a further two.

Collectively the council calls these groups the “Third Sector”. Many raise some of their own funds while others rely on various public grants or contracts from the council or the NHS – almost becoming delivery arms for the state.

Last year the funding for 70 of these groups was cut by the joint NHS and Council Board that oversees health and social care in Edinburgh. This week saw further agonising at the council about that funding gap.

NHS Lothian, short of funds through Scottish Government decisions, has effectively passed the buck to the equally cash strapped council, which is far more susceptible to community campaigning, being democratically elected. This state-organised cost and blame shunting led the council, with good intent, to allocate £3.5m from reserves to stave off the crisis, but as always there is no real plan.

On Monday councillors agreed to allocate £3m, with most of it being described as the “Third Sector Resilience Fund”. Except there is no “resilience” because it will all run out again next March just as council is looking for further savings across its own budget.

A parallel review of the council’s “approach to supporting the Third Sector” will report later this year, but it is very hard to see how this will fill the gap without more money that just isn’t available.

You might think, as I suggested, that the £500k of one-off funding left over might be best used to cushion any rationalisation this review proposes. Instead, it was easier for most councillors to agree to spend it immediately by opening it to bids from wider groups who haven’t even had a funding cut.

This creates a double danger of raised expectations of ongoing funding, with more failure when it doesn’t materialise. It is also dreadful politics because it will make the public outcry worse when the reckoning inevitably comes.

Ultimately, the council must decide what services are most needed in communities within the budget it has available. But with local groups all lobbying for their own continued existence, that’s a hard decision that most councillors will avoid.

The danger is that the council makes cuts to its own services and still fails to fund local groups strategically. They will then go under at random, leaving communities without the support they need.