Recent events might force a change of approach by Local Neighbourhood Partnerships (LNP’s) reports Lib Dem Group Leader cllr. Ian Shires.

Walsall’s Tories never did like LNP’s. One senior Tory has said more than once that he’d gladly see the back them! They only agreed to them as the price they had to pay for Lib Dem cooperation on delivering a 10 point plan to recover Walsall from the mess Labour had got the Council in during the 90′s.

Tories don’t like LNP’s because they put elected representitives (councillors) on the spot. There is no hiding place.

It sould be of no surprise therefore that as soon as the Tories achieved an overall majority on the Council they set about deminishing the role of LNP’s. They have reduced the amount of officer support and the amount of money provided by the Council to LNP’s for local projects.

At the conception of LNP’s each of the 9 got around £10,000 per Ward. Not a massive amount of cash when you look at the Council’s gross budget of in excess of £0.6Bn, but it helped the more enlightened LNP’s to begin to tackle some long standing local problems.

Last year, Walsall Council’s controlling Tories “shifted” responsibility for LNP’s away from itself to Walsall’s Local Stretegic Partnership (LSP). At the same time they reduced financial support for projects from £10,000 per Ward to £5,000 per Ward. Inspite of this one LNP (Lib Dem controlled Willenhall LNP) used its allocation to lever in around £1.5M to fund much needed local improvements.

In this years Budget the Tories allocated no monies for LNP’s and with Neibourhood Renewal Funding coming to an end there was the very real danger of LNP’s disappearing all together.

At a recent meeting of Walsall’s LSP Board it was agreed to provide £250,000 in order to keep the LNP’s running, but there would be no monies for projects, it was all for officer support.

Only a small minority on the Board (Lib Dem cllr. Ian Shires being one of them) voiced their disappointment.

“It seems that those deciding Walsall’s future want as little as possible to do with the democratic process” said Ian, “There seems little appetite amongst the “great and the good” who now run the show, for the true neighbourhood development that is needed to regenerate Walsall” he added.

“If LNP’s can’t spend on local projects themselves then perhaps we need to develop a different role in order to question the way in which the Council and others deliver services locally!” he concluded.