Summary
The Priority 3 strand of the 2017-2021 London Councils Grants Programme – Tackling poverty through employment – will complete at the end of June 2019.
Despite efforts to address delivery challenges, which have been reported to Grants Committee, the programme will under-deliver against the original targets set (both activity and financial). Based on the delivery profile to-date, the programme is estimated to outturn on completion at £3,019,000; half this value is attributable to the Grants programme. Considering management and administrative costs (see Financial Implications), it is projected that £1,135,000 will be returned to the Grants Programme once Priority 3 has completed.
Following a meeting of the Grants Committee Executive on 7 February 2019 (papers for the meeting) to discuss choices, this paper presents options to the Grants Committee for deploying the underspend, namely:
- Commission additional activity with existing commissions delivering across Priority 1 and Priority 2, to address the needs of London residents impacted by no recourse to public funds (sections 3 and 4)
- hold the underspend in reserves to allow the Grants Committee more time to consider the redeployment of funds (section 5)
- return funds to the boroughs through a one-off repatriation from reserves in 2020-21 (section 5).
