Peter Black and South Wales West Liberal Democrats

Communities and Culture Committee Report on the Voluntary Sector

Peter Black: Like Dai Lloyd, I welcome this report, and I wish to thank my fellow committee members and all of those who came to give evidence. Their contributions were invaluable and helped us to put together the set of recommendations that we have before us.

I will concentrate on just two or three of the recommendations, but it is worth noting that had we had a similar debate some four or five years ago, we may well have been looking at the same recommendations. That is not just because this report is overdue, but because these issues have been raised many times before; in fact, they have been raised throughout the life of the Assembly, and we still need to make further progress on them. Some progress has been made, but we need to move more quickly on that.

I refer in particular to the issues of sustainable funding, drawing together the grants that are available and making them far more accessible, and transparency of funding for many voluntary sector organisations. Many bodies in the third sector struggle to know exactly what grants are available, how to apply for them, and how to go about maximising their income from a huge range of funding sources that are available. That is why I think that recommendation 5 is particularly important. The recommendation suggests that the Welsh Assembly Government should commission the Wales Council for Voluntary Action to develop and maintain a central portal providing information on funding: one portal to rule them all, if you like-an innovation which, I think, is well overdue and worth advancing on.

Brian Gibbons: We are currently working on the Sustainable Funding Cymru website. Several people have commented that there is no such portal, but there is, and it seeks to facilitate this. I would be grateful if people would look at it, and I would be pleased to take any comments on how it could be improved.

Peter Black: Thank you, Brian. There is detail in the report is important, and it is useful to take it on board. One of our suggestions is to have a searchable database for funding streams, including advice on applying for grants and how to become more self-sufficient. I think that it is equally important that the portal is web based and well publicised and that it also has links to local authorities, county voluntary councils and private sector organisations, so that it is not just about Government funding, but the whole gamut of funding. I am sure that you will send the link around to all Members after this debate so that we can all pass comment on it and send those comments back to you. I would be happy to do so, and I am sure that others will be too.

That funding issue is fundamental to the report, and it is one of the reasons why the committee decided that it wanted to look at this issue. In going around our communities and talking to organisations, many of us get the same comments that we have always had, namely that there is no core funding available, that the funding is not there for three years when they get it and that they do not know how to access funding. I just hope that, as a result of this report, and as a result of the work that the Welsh Assembly Government is doing, which Brian has just referred to, that will start to change. If it does not start to change, I fear that we could be standing up in another few years' time having this debate all over again.

The other recommendations that I wanted to refer to relate to the three-year funding. I know that we have a lot of evidence on this issue, and I think that most organisations, by and large, are working towards that aim-the Welsh Assembly Government certainly is. I think that most local authorities are too, certainly in terms of the funding that they give as corporate bodies to voluntary organisations. The difficulty-and I have raised this issue on Swansea council, of which I am still a member-lies in the fact that the council gives grants corporately to many organisations, but there is also a whole series of other interactions between the voluntary sector and other council departments in terms of contracts for the delivery of particular services. For example, social services might give a grant here and housing or education might give a grant there-and those interactions do not come into that corporate whole. As a result, those small grants and small contracts get missed out in terms of the authority's policy on delivering three-year grant funding and all the other things that we want to put in place for that. It is important that a dialogue is established with local councils to try to deal with that. Those are the essential points that I wanted to make, and I would be happy to have further debates on this issue, if we could.