During the Mayor’s Sunday Service, Kendal’s new Mayor asked for the Parable of the Good Samaritan to be read. This must be the most famous answer ever to the question “Who is my neighbour?”

So it was with some interest that I went along to a meeting of the Kendal Neighbourhood Forum, a forum run by Cumbria County Council, the highest of the three levels of local government in this town. I am by instinct deeply suspicious of the flood of ‘consultation initiatives’ which have been launched in the UK – basically, the more pig-headed the government, the more they have wanted to ‘consult’ to convince people that they know best.

This Forum had a few presentations from various bodies, but it became apparent that the main reason why most people were there was the last item on the agenda. The Forum has real money to dish out to local community bodies, who had two minutes to pitch for funding. It was a bit like Dragons’ Den, but the dragons’ fires had been extinguished and their teeth removed. Various play groups, sports clubs, etc had their say and were granted amounts of between five hundred and a thousand pounds to help boost their existing fundraising for projects. As there was no restriction on the available pot, all the requests were duly approved by common acclaim.

It’s easy to be cynical about this. The seven grand or so dispensed tonight is not going to make much of a hole in Cumbria’s annual budget of around 350 million. The audience in the room were not likely to turn down requests. Putting all that to one side, it is true that the funds will make a difference to the community groups who receive them, and these groups are exactly the people the councils need to encourage if we are to build a greater ‘civic society’ in Kendal (not to confused with the Kendal Civic Society, who were co-incidentally one of the recipients of tonight’s largesse). In their various ways, these groups are indeed trying to be Good Samaritans. If this is one way they can extract money from ‘the system’ to help them, then good luck to them.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 12th, 2010 at 9:18 pm and is filed under Kendal Town Council. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.