Regeneration & Renewal,
5 September 2008
A London borough that was to be stripped of about £7 million of regeneration cash after a government blunder earlier this year has urged ministers to announce their final decision on whether the funding is indeed to be withdrawn.
Westminster City Council was told by the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) last December that it would receive £9.9 million of Working Neighbourhoods Fund money between 2008 and 2011.
But two months later the DCLG told the council that it was ineligible and would only receive £3 million before payments ended in 2010/11 (R&R, 8 February, p1).
The DCLG discovered that people in communal dwellings such as guesthouses, where many benefit claimants live, had mistakenly been omitted from data used to allocate the cash across England. Once they were factored in, the council areas were no longer among the 40 most deprived areas eligible for cash.
At the time, the DCLG said it would make a decision after consulting Westminster council and the London Borough of Camden, which also lost promised funding. But Westminster council said it has yet to receive an answer.
A DCLG spokeswoman said: "We will be making a final announcement in due course."
