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Sutherland is the poor relation when it comes to funding





The Way I See It column by Councillor Jim McGillivray

It sounds like a lot of money – £700,000.

It’s the Sutherland share of the Highland Coastal Communities Fund (HCCF) – the Crown Estate dividend – for this financial year and the last one, rolled into one bundle of cash to be dispensed for eligible projects in this county.

The central Highland pot which came down from the Crown Estates, was shared out by length of coastline and very unusually, Sutherland emerged from the calculation with the largest amount of money compared with the other area committees.

Councillor Jim McGillivray.
Councillor Jim McGillivray.

As things stand, there will be another payment in the next financial year but only a single-year payment, which, as with this year’s allocation, will be split as evenly as possible between the two Sutherland wards.

As the attentive reader will notice, the money is already reducing in impact. When one also considers that, even at very short notice, the total of the expressions of interest received thus far came in at around £2.5 million, then the £700,000 figure doesn’t look quite so marvellous in the cold grey light of a January dawn.

The level of demand for money in Sutherland for community and private development projects comes as no surprise.

The county has been completely underfunded in comparison with other component areas of the Highland Council for many years.

However, that is my old song which I’m sure readers of the Northern Times are tired of hearing.

In the recent past, we had the EU Leader funding programme to call upon, and if that had been present today, it would have provided valuable match funding to complement the limited riches of the HCCF.

But we are no longer politically connected to the EU, which provided the UK with £2.1 billion per year of structural funding up until the end of 2020.

This is just the UK getting some of its annual EU membership subscription back, but at least there was hard cash to be had even if it meant wading through a morass of bureaucracy.

What has been proposed by the UK Government is the Shared Prosperity Fund and it is pledged that it will be worth an average of about £1.5 billion a year for communities and charities– but might not be available until 2022.

At the present time it seems to have no great substance.

One can track down a 24 page pdf file on the subject, which states that the UK Government committed in its March 2020 Budget to “at a minimum, match current levels of funding to each nation from EU structural funds”.

A lot of words, and no actual money, but I suppose the present Covid emergency occupies a lot of government time.

Some may feel sorry for those Highland Council areas which missed out on the HCCF. Have no fear.

The new Alness Academy comes in at around £40 million, the proposed Tain 3-18 Campus will be roughly the same.

The new Broadford Primary will be £11 million, the combined Inverness schools are assigned over £50 million.

The Inverness West Link, having consumed £10 million, needs another £6 million, all of this on top of existing borrowings of £925 million.

At least the new Dornoch Cemetery has £309,000 allocated.

Stay safe.

Embo resident Cllr McGillivray is one of three councillors representing the East Sutherland and Edderton ward.


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