The £1 million Community Fund that Mayor Luke Campbell announced last month has taken a step forward after being agreed in principle by the Combined Authority’s Executive Board. The Reform UK Mayor told the Board that “over 700” people have already submitted ideas for how the money could be used.
In August, the Mayor took to social media platform X to announce the £1 million fund, telling residents: “Please tell me where you want to see this money being spent. It’s all down to you.”
The website lukeasksyou.com has been set up, inviting members of the public to submit ideas for how the money should be spent. On the website Mr Campbell writes: “I promised to work with, and for, the people of Hull and East Yorkshire when elected Mayor. I’m keeping that promise.”
At a meeting of the Hull and East Yorkshire Combined Authority’s (HEYCA) Executive Board, held on September 26 at the Aura Innovation Centre, Hessle, Board members agreed to note the creation of the fund. After receiving this approval, the next phase of the process will be for the Combined Authority to outline how the scheme will work in practice and how bids will be submitted and judged.
The Mayor told Board members that over 700 applications have been submitted to the website, with people suggesting ideas for how the funding could be used to improve their communities. He added that many of the ideas have revolved around helping young people to get into sports and the setting up of youth clubs.
At the meeting, Humberside’s Police and Crime Commissioner, Jonathan Evison, expressed his support for the fund and offered to help the Mayor where he can. Both the leaders of Hull City Council (Cllr Mike Ross) and East Riding Council (Cllr Anne Handley) backed the idea of setting up a community fund. Cllr Ross did add that the further detail that is yet to come will be “really important.”
The categorisation of the fund as a ‘non-key decision’ has led to some confusion and was raised at the Combined Authority’s first Overview and Scrutiny Committee meeting held on September 17. The confusion stems from the fact has been described as “a £1m Community Fund.”
The HEYCA constitution states that a ‘key decision’ is set at £1 million. This would seemingly suggest that the Mayor’s fund should be classified as a being ‘key’. This point was raised by Cllr Tom Astell at the Scrutiny meeting who said: “We’ve just spent an hour talking about something that’s a ‘non-key decision’ which is for £1 million.” He added: “If the fund is £999,999.99 then fair enough its less than £1 million.”
At the scrutiny meeting Mr Campbell responded to Cllr Astell saying that a key decision is “£1 million or less” to which Cllr Astell responded “well to be fair Mr Mayor, that’s not what it says in the document that we’ve got in front of us.” The matter was clarified by the chair of the meeting, Cllr Richard Meredith, confirmed the classification “should be up to and including £1 million.”
By: Andrew Spence, LDRS
