Answer – nothing!
Not a sign of what we were promised when Brexit stopped the EU’s wonderful LEADER programme in its tracks – and what was it that had fired up bottom-up projects across the poorer rural areas of the country – and those adjoining? – LEADER
The Tories said they’d replace it with a scheme of their own – somewhere in Defra’s wastepaper basket.
The current government probably have no idea we ever used to get 2 million pounds to spend on projects that were suggested by people living and trying to work in the uplands, on the coastal plains, in tiny communities stripped of their facilities by all the glorious progress we’ve been making since the 1980s.
LEADER
How did LEADER work? – you – anyone, any age, any income bracket – came up with a good idea – filled in an enormous form and came to talk first to the local person running the tiny office. Worked out costs, benefits, etc with them and then presented it to a committee of local people who talked it through and if it seemed it would work, they allowed you a budget to get on with it. Simple – it could be a set of gazebos to run a farmer’s market, an international get-together for young folk musicians in the North Pennines with their counterparts in Sweden, a forestry scheme, a van to deliver home- baked bread, a camp in the middle of nowhere for kids to discover wildlife and music making, an exchange with lime-mortars makers in Alston and Rumania; the last couple of thousand pounds for a village hall extension…
Each programme lasted 10 years – then there was another one – kept on working.
Local people’s ideas because they knew what they needed to just lift their lives – decided by more local people who’d know whether it could work and what sort of a difference it could make. Bottom-up not top-down. Successful.
Couldn’t last!!!
Wendy Bond
Greenhead
