'Power to the people' pledge over £20million cash handout

'It’s about giving decision-making back to the community'

A new group set up to spend £20 million of government money in Torquay has pledged it will be ‘power to the people’ when it comes to working out who gets it.

The Torquay Place Leadership Board will invite local people to submit ideas for projects to make the most of the decade-long programme, and chair Jim Parker said money could go to anything from a major building project to a single dog bin on the roadside.

But, he stressed, all the ideas would come from the community.

“This really is about power to the people,” he said. “It’s about giving decision-making back to the community.”

The board’s job is to create a 10-year strategy for spending the money which is coming from the government’s Plan For Neighbourhoods initiative.

Members of the board include Torbay’s MP as well as the leader and chief executive of Torbay Council and representatives from local businesses, community, youth and religious groups. The Devon and Cornwall police commissioner is a member, as is the co-chairman of Torquay United.

“The community will come up with schemes to make life better, healthier and happier for the people of Torquay,” said Mr Parker. “They are the ones who will drive the funding.”

Torquay is the only town in the south west to qualify for the money, and a meeting of the board heard that this was due to its deprivation, crime rates, economic inactivity and low-income jobs among other factors.

“How we got the funding is not rocket science,” said Mr Parker. “Now the challenge is about making sure we’ve got the right schemes and we can deliver them.”

Council leader David Thomas said it was important to ‘follow the data’ when it came to selecting ways in which the money would be spent.

“We need to be upfront with our communities from the beginning,” he said. “No scheme is barred, but we need to spend the money where the data is telling us to spend it.”

Professor Chris Balch, who chairs the Torbay and South Devon NHS Trust, said the board would need clear goals to tackle issues that could take a generation to fix, while Torbay MP Steve Darling said affordable housing should be a priority.