Pride in Place Applications Invited
HUGH SULLIVAN
The Hastings Neighbourhood Board (HNB), charged with allocating £20 million of government money over the next ten years to boost community amenities and activities in the town, is inviting bids from groups of residents or community organisations with proposals of how best to spend it.
This funding programme – originally launched by Rishi Sunak’s government as the Long Term Plan For Towns, then re-branded under Labour as its Plan for Neighbourhoods, then further re-branded as Pride in Place – is to be divided between three separate pots. One, styled Pride in Our Streets, will provide up to £250,000 per year for small-scale ‘interventions’ in the public realm, such as provision of bins, bus shelters, benches or murals; a second, styled Pride in Our Neighbourhood, offers up to £500,000 per year for projects such as improvements to community centres, sports facilities and youth activities; a third, named Pride in Our Town, will make up to £1 million available per year for heritage projects and major infrastructure in the town centre or on the seafront.
A separate fund of £1m, called the Pride in Place Impact Fund, was announced in March to be spent on installing or upgrading playgrounds in neighbourhoods across the borough, including a ‘transformation’ of the existing facility in Alexandra Park.
Applications for funding from the first two pots are now being invited. The opportunity to bid will remain open until 31 August, with decisions expected in October. The criteria for choosing one bid over another have not been spelled out, nor is it clear who within the HNB will ultimately make the choices.
Former Hastings Borough Council (HBC) manager Kevin Boorman is Chair of the Board. Its decisions are supposed to be independent of either the borough or county councils, but its administrative staff are seconded from HBC employment, and it has proclaimed a policy of requiring ‘match funding’ from councils or other stakeholders – for example, a housing association will be expected to contribute where a facility is improved on its land. Good relations, and favourable negotiation, with these authorities is therefore paramount.
Other current HNB members include Hastings & Rye MP Helena Dollimore, and representatives from the county council, Sussex Police, Hastings Voluntary Action, Arts Hastings CIC, the Chamber of Commerce and other business groups. In recent months the Board has sought to expand and diversify its membership “to add new voices and different perspectives”, and has reported receiving 123 individual applications to join. Sixteen of these applicants have been short-listed; none has yet been appointed.
How any Board member, whether existing or to be added, will influence future funding decisions, remains to be resolved. Past decisions taken by the similarly constituted Town Deal Board (including the award in 2022 to develop the ill-fated Owens enterprise in the former Debenhams building) were taken opaquely, and seemingly determined in practice by external management consultancies assessing ‘business cases’. The HNB is no doubt mindful of this history, and aims for something different.
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