'You decide' Community to choose how to spend £20m

A GOVERNMENT minister came to Hartcliffe yesterday to call on everyone in the community to overcome their cynicism, and get involved in the decisions on how to spend £20 million of Government investment over the next ten years.

- Tristan CORK

And community leaders and councillors joined that appeal, and urged people to attend a public meeting next week.

The Government's new £5 billion Pride in Place scheme will see 169 areas receive £2 million every year for a decade, and 11 of those areas are in the South West, including the Bournville estate in Weston-super-Mare, Twerton in Bath, two areas of Swindon and Hartcliffe in South Bristol.

So Communities Minister Miatta Fahnbulleh came to Hartcliffe and said she was there not to tell people how the money would be spent, but to tell them they had to get organised and decide for themselves how that sort of long-term investment would be best spent.

A Pride in Place neighbourhood board is to be set up, and the minister held a round-table discussion with local councillors, organisations and community leaders to kick things off, but said everyone in Hartcliffe should get involved to make sure that the decisions aren’t “made for them but by them”.

“We're bringing the community together to say: ‘What's the place that we want? What are the changes that we want in our area? And then we give them the resources, we give them the power, we give them the agency in order to be able to respond to that,” Ms Fahnbulleh said.