Thursday, August 06, 2009

No town centre regeneration cash for Nairn

Just in from one of the regular Gurnites:
'Nairn Lucked out of the draw for town centre regeneration funds - Dingwall got it for the highland. It seems a little unfair that Highland was only allocated one town whilst North Ayreshire got three.'
Details of the lucky winners can be found on this Riaghaltas na h-Alba webpage.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

We will forever be known as the town of dreams

David Brownless said...

I am very disappointed that Nairn has not been successful in the first round of applications for this funding.

Hopefully, after considering the feedback given, the application can be resubmitted for the second round of awards.

I must admit though that I feel that the whole of the north of Scotland has been sold short by these awards. The details can be seen at - http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/Built-Environment/regeneration/town-centres/tcrf/FirstTrancheAllocations

One of the notes on the process says-

" iii. Consideration by the Independent Advisory Panel, with recommendations emerging that sought to take account of both quality and geographic spread

I don't know about anyone else but I fail to see how awarding approx £720,000 out of £40 million to an area which basically comprises everywhere north of Stonehaven in anyway achieves 'geographic spread'.

It works out at about 1.75% of the total funding. Even if you take population into account I'm sure that it's still a disproportionately low amount for the area and its people.

Seems that , once again, we see the evidence of the gravitational pull of the Central Belt at its most effective.The more that Government gets away with distributing funding with such a bias, the more they'll do it.

I will certainly be interested to see the reasons for the application's lack of success, and will be pressing to have it re-submitted for the second tranche of awards later in the year.

Anonymous said...

And Dreamers!