At today’s meeting at Cornwall Council, Cllr Dick Cole seconded a motion, which challenged the failure of the UK Government to allocate funding to Cornwall through their “Pride in Place” programme. The motion was proposed by Lib Dem councillor Ruth Gripper and received near-unanimous support across the Council.

Cllr Cole’s speech was as follows:

“I am pleased to be able to second this motion. It is important that we challenge Westminster and Whitehall on why no communities in Cornwall received funding through the “Pride in Place” programme.

“Cllr Gripper has focussed on the lack of rural-proofing and that the ‘methodology’ put in place is clearly wrong. I would call the approach a “nonsense” – because, how can any assessment of deprivation, fail to identify a single community in Cornwall for investment from a programme focussing on deprived communities.

“I would like to contrast the non-investment in Cornwall, with what has happened in Wales.

“Cornwall has a population of about 580,000 people, while the number of people in Wales is around 3.2 million. I make that a ratio of around one-to-six.

“We have only one principal authority – but there are 22 such authorities to the west of Offa’s Dyke. And, in the round of funding announced last autumn, funding was made available for one or more communities in every single one of these councils.

“Nine of the council areas in Wales were granted £20 million for a neighbourhood. I found it interesting that even though the authorities stated that the communities identified for investment were carefully chosen, an associated list showed that, for each of these nine areas, the specific neighbourhood for investment was to ‘be selected at a later stage.’

“In addition, a further £1.5 million to “upgrade public facilities” were allocated to every single one of the 22 councils in Wales.

“So how can it be that communities in Wales will be getting £213 million, but Cornwall has been allocated nothing. If we had the same pro-rata funding by population, Cornwall would have got about £38 million!

“We need to collectively challenge this. Please support this motion.”