Malcolm Chisholm: Services suffering from regeneration cash cuts

Published on Tuesday 2 December 2008 09:12

THE worst cuts to regeneration funding I have ever seen are currently being played out in north Edinburgh. The average cut is 37 per cent, although some well established and highly respected projects are losing more than half of their budget.

National regeneration funding streams have been rolled up into a single Fairer Scotland Fund. The allocation to Edinburgh was a cash standstill, which was bad enough, but the scale of the cut to the Pilton, Granton and Muirhouse areas was intensified by a decision to distribute the money far more thinly across Edinburgh. This totally fails to understand the nature of deprivation and its cumulative impact within certain areas.

Not only are these projects widely admired, but they are also the product of action by the local community over many years. For example, North Edinburgh Childcare grew out of sustained campaigning of local parents and is now arguably the best childcare service in Scotland. Its budget is to be cut like all the rest.

Women Supporting Women is another example. It does superb and invaluable work with women facing a range of problems but its budget has been halved. Nobody is thinking of all the extra work this will create for the statutory agencies, as well as consequences for individuals and families.

Other projects to be cut are the Pilton Equalities Project, North West Carers, the Black Community Development Project, Granton Information Centre, the Pilton Youth and Children's Project and the Muirhouse Millennium Centre.

At a meeting of the projects that I attended last week, one highly respected local activist said that the developments of more than thirty years were all being undone in a few months. I would like to believe that the city council and the Edinburgh Partnership did not realise the full consequences. They know now and must act to put it right.

Either the council must find resources from its mainstream budgets to protect these important services or some of the all Edinburgh part of the Fairer Scotland Fund will have to be used to stop this unacceptable carnage.

&#149 Malcolm Chisholm is Labour MSP for Edinburgh North and Leith.