Question:
Residents have been asking me about the £250k hardship fund in Lib Dem leaflets. Please can you share how residents in crisis can apply for payments from this hardship fund?
Minutes:
Residents have been asking me about the £250,000 hardship fund in Lib Dem leaflets. Please can you share how residents in crisis can apply for payments from this hardship fund?
Answer
Thank you for your question, Laura. I was a little bit surprised to get it as you are a member of the cross-party working group which looked at how this £250,000 should be spent. You also spoke against spending this money on residents in need in a previous Council meeting. However, the more publicity we can get for our residents on how they can get help in a crisis the better, and I am very happy to repeat our message here tonight.
Wokingham Borough Council and our Hardship Alliance partners have a number of well-established routes to provide grants and financial assistance directly to residents in need. These include our Local Welfare Provision Fund, the Council Tax Reduction Scheme and the Household Support Fund. Details of how residents can access this help is on the Cost-of-Living Help page on the WBC website. It is also publicised in our paper publications, such as the Cost-of-Living Crisis Leaflet which was delivered to every home in the Borough.???
The £250,000 Hardship Fund which I think that you are referencing here, is different. This money is an additional fund, which the Liberal Democrat administration, working closely with the officers, has allocated to fund a number of key projects. These projects will make a long-term difference to the lives of our residents, tackling and preventing the root cause of hardship. They will deliver for our residents for years to come. These projects address a number of key areas and were selected after extensive cross-party consultation with councillors, including yourself, and our Voluntary and Community Sector partners. We will be publicising the projects selected in the coming weeks, but I am happy to share tonight that they will include a community food project to help residents afford nutritious food, a pilot scheme for ‘poverty proofing the school day’, and funding which will help children growing up in low income families to access school uniforms and essential learning materials and to be able to participate in all aspects of school life. These projects will change the lives of many people in the Borough, and I hope that you and the Conservatives will be able to support them.
Supplementary Question:
Thank you for your answer. I understand it to be a project fund as well which is why residents pushed me on it, because they said that sadly these people are used to going for hardship funds themselves, and they said that they understood hardship funds to be a direct, discretionary payment to those in hardship, so that is why they have been misled by this wording. So, we really do need to start calling it a Project Fund because that is what it is and that is what you explained here. They cannot directly apply for it.
My question is, what consultation has this Council done with residents who are in crisis and residents who can benefit from these projects as what they want this £250,000 spent on, and I do not mean consultation with charities who are going to help spend the money, but directly with residents themselves?
Supplementary Answer:
The consultation was with us as cross party councillors, people who understand our wards and our residents the best, and with the Voluntary and Community Sector, the Hardship Alliance and with the Hardship Alliance Action Group, who provide us with a really good way of effectively contacting residents and understanding grass roots concerns so that we can understand what residents in the Borough would like the money to be spent on.