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Sheffield council to help fill NDC budget hole

Herpreet Kaur Grewal, Regeneration & Renewal, 29 June 2009

A share of Sheffield City Council's budget that was underspent last year is to go into rescuing projects left in jeopardy as a result of financial turmoil at a New Deal for Communities project.

Burngreave NDC has spent £51.5 million of its £52 million budget - which was supposed to last until 2011 - leaving schemes that had been promised funding at risk.

But now the council is making around £19 million available to help fund some of the projects that the NDC was meant to support, according to a report that lays out the council's budget for 2009/10.

Around £577,000 will go towards meeting the costs of an early intervention and prevention strategy, which aims to support children and families from disadvantaged backgrounds by increasing their access to children's services and improving learning outcomes.

Another £84,000 will go to Sheffield Youth Council, which gives young people a voice in local decision-making, and was also supposed to be financially supported by the NDC.

Council leader Paul Scriven said that the financial problems within the NDC arose because "people in charge of the programme were simply not managing things properly". He added: "It would not be possible to bail out every project that does not achieve its ambitions, but in this case, when those ambitions are so important, we have to make sure that they are realised."

Earlier this year, the NDC told 17 community bodies it supported that they would receive no funding from April (R&R, 2 March, p6).

Last year, the NDC was criticised by council auditors for hiring Bill Husband as deputy chief executive, after he had been sacked for gross misconduct while running an NDC in London (R&R, 6 June 2008, p4).

- The financial report is here