What is a Mayoral Neighbourhood Fund?
Christmas trees? Litter picks? Top of the range all terrain vehicles? All this and more...
Up until recently, I’d looked forward to the Liverpool Post arriving in my inbox, but this weekend’s hitpiece on charity worker Gerard Woodhouse confirmed some nasty doubts and I cancelled my subscription. I don’t even know or have an opinion on the guy, but the writers seemed way too eager to play the man and not the ball, and I wondered if there was a deeper agenda (14 November 2022… this is me talking from the future! I have since spoken about this to the Post, I don’t think they had an agenda anymore and I’ve re-subscribed. In fact I think they’re bloody ace and a vital part of the local media. Read my later posts to find out why). Anyway…
One thing in the article that piqued my interest is it referred in some detail to the Mayoral Neighbourhood Fund, something I’d so far failed to find much information about, so I did a bit of digging and eventually found a 162 page PDF on Liverpool City Council’s website (under item 42i in the papers for the Cabinet meeting held 22 October 2021, duh!). The PDF contains an itemised list of every payment made from the Mayoral Neighbourhood Fund (MNF) since April 2015. I did a bit of casual prodding around (scraped the table into .csv format, converted to .odf, spent 3 hours cleaning and reformatting 5500 rows of data then made some pivot tables) and what I found was pretty interesting.
But before I go into what it contains, let’s address the question, what is an MNF? I don’t know. I gave up looking for any kind of terms of reference, application form or policy on the council’s typically impenetrable website. There is a page for “Community initiatives, grants and funding” but there’s no mention of MNF on there. I can tell you it’s overseen by the Neighbourhood Select Committee, and in 2021/22 is worth £1m (of which 4.3% is spent on admin costs) distributed unevenly across the 30 wards for councillors to “deliver on local priorities”. It seems that in earlier years there was a cap of £3,000 per project, but that no longer applies. From what I can tell, it’s a discretionary slush fund for councillors to use as they see fit.
Already ringing some alarm bells? Not only could I not find any related policy in the council’s lengthy library, other council and local authorities with similar schemes have much more clearly defined objectives. For example, Nottinghamshire’s “Councillors Divisional Fund” allocates each County Councillor £5,000 “to offer financial support to organisations, charities and community groups within their division that actively support the community.” Charities and community groups? Ok. Organisations? Yeah, that’s a bit vague, but there are explicit conditions on what sort of payments can be given to profit-making organisations. If Liverpool does have similar guidelines, I’m not sure they’re being adhered to.
Before I go into what I found, a quick note about the data. It’s abysmal. The table has four columns: Ward, Goods and Services Required, Supplier Details and Cost. They’re not broken down by councillor (I was told all three councillors for each ward have to agree on spend. In Tuebrook, rivals Steve Radford (Liberal) and Carol Sung (Labour) make a point of initialling their entries). The “Supplier Details” is ambiguous - it might just be a skip provider or local venue, but sometimes it might say “high street vouchers” or the name of a youth club or charity. It’s really obvious that there should be a column for “Supplier” and one for “Beneficiary”. The “Goods and Services Required” usually contains more information, but often it doesn’t. There are numerous omissions, errors and typos. A single organisation, e.g. The Liverpool Six Community Association might appear under “L6 Centre”, “Liverpool 6 Centre”, “L6 Comm Ass” and more, leading me to suspect no overarching analysis of spend has ever been carried out. At least, not until this spreadsheet nerd with way too much time on her hands came along…
Ok, some headline stats. Since April 2015, £6,380,251.39 has been spent across 5,182 payments. To how many organisations? Ask me next year and I may have the answer. Though I’ve spent some time combining the multiple names of the largest recipients, I still have 1565 different “suppliers” and 93 payments where the supplier is blank (edit: there was a formatting error when I converted the PDF and I managed to fill in most of the blanks), however 16 are still blank). First I’ll go into some of the largest recipients.
I have to say, I don’t believe that just because some organisations received large sums that means they didn’t deserve it or it wasn’t the best use of the cash, but the council’s own procedures state that when a contract for works, services and supplies is between £5k and £100k, a quotation exercise should be carried out, and over £100k a tendering process. I’ve found two companies that received more than £100k of MNF funding in single years (Kirkby Skips and Liverpool Streetscene Services Ltd). It’s likely there are call off contracts in place with these companies, but it still just seems like a strange way to spend such large sums.
In the VCSE sector, the biggest recipients since 2015 are Granby Toxteth Development Trust (£326,009.69), Liverpool Six Community Organisation (£151,465.74) and Norris Green Community Alliance (£88,794.93 since 2017). But it’s the other organisations that concern me: Plus Dane, Merseyside Police, Riverside Housing and Amey. Along with Liverpool Streetscene (£360,618.36 - who mostly supply skips and bins), the housing associations Plus Dane (£213,536.49) and Riverside (£251,449.76) and the highways contracter Amey (£113,399.37) all carry out functions that once upon a time where delivered in-house by the council, and the MNF payments seem to be only covering the types of activity you’d expect your council tax to already cover - painting railings, removing rubbish, putting up ‘no ball games’ signs, installing dropped kerbs. So if you live in Mossley Hill, you might get to enjoy a “storytelling and craft session”, in Greenbank your councillors will provide you with yoga classes, while in Kirkdale you can look forward to the community-building group activity of watching Pest Control come and put bait down the sewers (I don’t know what company “Pest Control” refers to, but they’re the 7th largest supplier at £136,399.00. Certain wards have not spent any of their MNF with this supplier).
So to me, it seems that some Liverpool council tax payers are paying twice, with statutory services and matters of public health and hygiene coming both from the council’s main budget and the money that could be spent on helpful extras - the kind of activities that make life enjoyable and strengthen communities (do not think for a moment I am anti-storytelling or yoga). But the most egregious, jawdropping use of the MNF is to its eighth largest recipient: Merseyside Police who have received £130,392.04 with another £33,500.00 going to the Police & Crime Commissioner.
Now you already explicitly pay for the police as part of your council tax. The precept for 2022/23 is £157 for a household in Band A and £474 in Band H. The Police and Crime Commissioner oversees a number of grants and funds available for crime prevention and grassroots initiatives in Merseyside. So do you want to take a guess at what the MNF is paying the police for? Pat a police dog day? Rides on the Mersey for pensioners on their high speed boat? Drone lessons for teenagers?
In 2020/21, six wards, four of which are in the poorest 50% in Liverpool, clubbed together to gift the police a £12,000 quad bike. The wards were Knotty Ash, Clubmoor, Fazakerley, Kensington & Fairfield, Old Swan and West Derby. I checked, and £12,000 is about the most you can spend on a quad bike. I don’t know why they needed another one, I don’t know what they do with all the perfectly good ones they seize and I don’t know why the money meant to enhance the lives of people in those wards is being spent on policing in Sefton Park.
There’s going to have to be a part 2. I haven’t even touched on some of the surprising individuals named as “suppliers” in this PDF. I’ll also eventually upload the data as a Google Sheet so you can search and analyse it easier yourself. But I will say that in a recent Echo article, Cllr Kris Brown states that prior to an internal audit of the fund in 2019, “there was a lack of checks and balances”. If the quality of this data is any indication, it doesn’t look like much has changed.
From one spreadsheet nerd to another, pretty interesting indeed and looking forward to part 2 and the Google sheet. As you say, the issue isn't necessarily with the individual funded activities but the lack of transparency and accountability. I'd be interested to see which areas are using the fund the supplement budgets for basic services and which have the helpful extras
Thanks for sharing