How much is it worth to local economies, in pounds and pence, to provide sexual health advice to teenagers on a deprived housing estate? What financial benefits to local businesses are generated when outreach workers meet street drinkers in the park to provide information on health and housing? What contribution to a region's gross domestic product is made by laying on local history lessons for asylum-seekers?
Silly questions. The benefits of community work cannot fit neatly into an accountant's spreadsheet. But according to the charity Urban Forum, local community groups, precisely because they cannot quantify the benefits of their work in financial terms, stand to lose £60m.
This is because the Single Regeneration Budget, the source of such funding since 1994, is being wound down. By the end of 2004, government regeneration cash will be managed and distributed solely through the nine regional development agencies. But as Urban Forum points out, in a report funded by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and published on 15 October, RDAs concentrate on job creation, economic infrastructure and large-scale regeneration projects such as airports, business complexes and tourism promotion. Small community organisations don't readily fit their remit.
The organisations threatened include Black Card, which supports projects to tackle the social exclusion of ethnic minorities in Sheffield. It reckons it will lose £1.2m. "When we lose our key funding," says Black Card's Freda Coterell, "we will lose our community workers, and the whole project will be taken back to zero. We'll lose everything we've built." Black Card would like to get money from Yorkshire Forward, the regional development agency, but the agency's tight remit compels it to concentrate on developing, for example, a new regional airport.
The Five Lamps Organisation, a social regeneration partnership in Thornaby, Cleveland, fears it will lose at least £679,000, a quarter of its turnover. Five Lamps provides everything from computer training to childcare across four community centres. One project, which advises residents of a housing estate about to be bulldozed, is expected to close. "More than 3,200 people a year go through our four advice centres," said Graeme Oram, the Five Lamps chief executive. "It's going to be very difficult to keep those centres open." And according to Urban Forum, it will miss out on funding from One NorthEast, the local RDA, because it "was not able to articulate" its "contribution to economic regeneration".
To be fair, the RDAs, knowing there is a problem, are actively looking for ways to fund social projects within the economic remit handed down from the Department of Trade and Industry. Michael Ward, chief executive of the London Development Agency, says that in London especially, social and economic problems are inextricably linked. "It makes sense for us to pick up this work, but it needs to be given to us from the government."
The government says that community groups can turn to European regeneration money, the New Deal for Communities and the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund. But Urban Forum says that even when these other sources are accounted for, there will still be a £60m shortfall in cash for social regeneration. European funding is too bureaucratic and complex for tiny community groups to navigate, and the two government funds target only specific areas of the country.
Ministers say they care about social exclusion. Do they care enough to tackle the funding gap for these groups - by ring-fencing some regional development agency money, say, for social regeneration?
