MARCH MONEY MADNESS

It's the last week of March, the end of the government financial year and most people in the public sector, and voluntary organisations like ours who draw down public money are rushing around like the proverbial blue-bottled fly trying to spend every last penny of their budget before the hour glass runs out.

We've got two projects where we've got money to spare and to spend this week..

Our garden project has been given £4000 by the County Council for which we are very grateful. But actually it seems they were bending over backwards to get rid of the money before the end of the financial year... And we've done our best to spend it for them and work is going on this week, and plants have been bought and wait to be delivered..And thankfully we are not being pursued too hard to make sure every receipt or invoice is dated before 1st April.


Our other project is a computer suite where we have put together a complex funding package from SRB6 and the Safer and Stronger Communities Fund Actually it is a very exciting project and again we are grateful for all the funding we can get.

There really is a bit of madness in this as the first funder is only supporting us for next year (07/08) while the second is offering matched funding from this year's budget (06/07). This means that we have had to spend £5k on equipment this month and submit claim forms and invoices, while the actual installation of the computer suite to make sense of the whole project cannot start till April 1st and will have to be claimed for in the first quarter of next year. And the same goes for the output monitoring, we have to write in the figure 1 four times in a spreadsheet for the SSCF claim to show that we had a target and achiecved it for the last quarter of 06/07 which actually amounted spending the money to buy some cameras and computer equipment. The reality is the government does not believe anything exists unless you can count it (and I'm told a tick in the box won't do as apparently the Treasury can't handle binary maths!)

In our case and with lots of other voluntary agencies we haven't yet officially heard whether revenue grant applications to fund next years salaries are coming through. So we have a double madness of frantic last minute capital spending while people on short term contracts are leaving their jobs or being made redundant at the end of their project

At the same time other public sector bodies such as hospitals have already spent all their dosh for this year and are having to cancel operations.

Surely there must be a more rational and sustainable way of funding public sector programmes and voluntary sector projects. Still I suppose the present regime does keep accountants and auditors in work on a long term basis!!!!