Pendle Vision Board Website Launched

Pendle's Vision Board have launched their new state-of-the-art website to promote Pendle and attract inward investment.

The website promotes The Pendle Advantage - a great place to live, work and play.

It includes interviews with Pendle's business leaders, telling real success stories about real people and local businesses.

It also highlights Pendle's fascinating history and the decisions made by famous visionaries while in the area.

The website was developed by a Pendle business, Northstar Design.

To have a look at the new website, click here

Local Area Agreements Reward Guidance 2009

The Department for Communities and Local Government have released the guidance on how Local Area Agreement (LAA) Reward Grant will be calculated for the new LAAs that started in June 2008.

There is a total of £340m to incentivise the achievement of LAA targets which will supplement the Area Based Grant received by successful local authorities in 2011-13.

The key points are:

• Reward will be calculated based upon average performance across the up to 35 designated LAA improvement targets agreed by local areas and government. These do not include the statutory DCSF targets in the National Indicators Set or purely local, non-designated targets
• No reward will be payable if an area’s average performance is below a minimum level
• All of the reward on offer will be payable if all targets are achieved the baselines and target levels used to calculate reward grant will be confirmed in March 2009 for most indicators
• Claims for performance reward grant will be paid in two instalments during 2011-12 and 2012-13, each with a 28 per cent capital element

The full document contains the calculations involved in judging success and a detailed a breakdown of the appropriate baselines and collection methods involved in deciding if a target has been achieved.

The full document can be downloaded here.

Commissioning of funding for community projects

To help Pendle Partnership achieve the goals in the Sustainable Community Strategy, Pendle Council is encouraging organisations from the statutory, private, voluntary, community and faith sectors to apply for funding which will help to:

• get people back into work or training


• improve community relations


• prevent violent extremism

There are three funds to tackle these issues and each fund has detailed conditions.
Download the conditions for funding here.

Download the application form here.

Download the print advertisment.

When completing the application form you will need to refer to Pendle Partnership's Good Practice checklist.

The deadline for applications is 5pm on Friday 27th February.

For more information telephone Anita Emmott on (01282) 661986 or e-mail anita.emmott@pendle.gov.uk

Real Help for Communities

'Real Help for Communities: Volunteers, Charities and Social Enterprises' is a new action plan released by the Government which outlines £42.5m of support for the third sector to help cope with the current economic climate.

The funding is broken down into a range of elements which will help address the specific areas of need that have arisen due to the recession.

The Government have based the need for the funding on key principles such as improving equality, social mobility, directing resources at frontline services and encourages third sector organisations to work together.

The money is broadly broken down as follows:

• Up to £10 million investment in a volunteer brokerage scheme for unemployed people. This will create over 40,000 opportunities for people to learn new skills and give back to communities through volunteering. – From April 2009
• A £15.5 million Community Resilience Fund will provide grant funding to small and medium providers in communities most at risk of increased deprivation due to the recession. This is in addition to the £130 million already committed to the Grassroots Grants programme meaning more small grants to more community groups – Available from April 2009
• A £16.5 million modernisation fund to support viable third sector organisations to access specialist services in order to restructure and become more resilient and efficient in the recession. Funding for organisations available from summer 2009
• £0.5 million investment in the School for Social Entrepreneurs to expand its action-learning programme to support social entrepreneurs

You can access the full funding guidance here.

Some key milestones for the funding were also released and they can be seen here.

The deadlines are pretty tight with most of the funding available from April 2009.

Comprehensive Area Assessment (CAA) - Final Framework Released

After several periods of consultation, the Audit Commission have released the final framework for the new Comprehensive Area Assessment (CAA).

The new inspection regime aims to provide greater linkage between the different inspectorates that evaluate the performance of services in an area.

CAA will take a more holistic view of services provided in an area and assess how different service providers are working together to improve the quality of life for local residents. The LAA and the National Indicators are crucial to the new process.

There are two main elements to the new CAA:

1. Area Assessment - at Lancashire level but will consider the performance of services at lower levels and how they are working towards the LAA priorities.
2. Organisational Assessment - for individual organisations (eg. councils) assessing their Use of Resources and how they manage performance. Organisations will be given an overall score out of 4 (where 4 is the best).

The results will be published on an interactive website which will enable residents to see how their local services perform. A demo of this website is available here

A full copy of the new CAA framework can be downloaded here

Other information on the CAA can be accessed on the Audit Commission's website here: http://www.audit-commission.gov.uk/caa/