This is what Lord McNally said on CAB funding on 3 rd reading. It is still not quite clear why he thinks the voluntary sector can survive a 77% cut in its funding with only 20% of that £100 million per annum cut being reprieved and then only on a 2 year temporary basis with no guarantee that the "reprieve" can be spent on running costs. Quite absurd.
"Lord McNally.......Secondly, we have been focusing on delivering additional resources for citizens advice bureaux and similar, which provide the general, practical advice that can often prove better than the drawn-out, adversarial experience of legal action. As noble Lords know, the Chancellor announced last week that we will be making a further £20 million-and this time it is £20 million of new money-available for each of the next two financial years. This comes on top of the £100 million voluntary sector transition fund.
Lord Beecham (Labour)
That is on top of the £80 million of cuts to citizens advice bureaux.
Lord McNally (Minister of State, Justice; Liberal Democrat)
Citizens advice bureaux operate in a country that is 10 per cent poorer than the last Government gave the country to understand. It is absurd to pretend that citizens advice bureaux or any other sector-local government and national government -should not face this reality. ..........." www.theyworkforyou.com/lords/?gid=2012-03-27a.1271.0
It infuriates me that the Government always trots out the £100m Transition Fund as an excuse in the LASPO debates, so yesterday I wrote to Lord Beecham suggesting he challenges it, as the fund was not just for advice agencies. He agreed it might be useful to highlight to Lib Dems during the forthcoming ping-pong. I did a quick search of the Transition Fund awards, and while it's difficult to identify all organisations that provide advice, only 5.2% of the Fund went to CABx and Law Centres.
I've uploaded it to the site as I created formulas to show the totals (bottom of the list). I went through manually searching for CABx and Law Centres - they are marked as such in the right-hand column; the formulas use these to create the totals.
