Two things have happened since I posted about the LDA declining to continue funding employment projects in the Kings Cross area, including the Construction Training Centre which equips local people for getting jobs on the neighbourhood's ambitious regeneration project.
The first thing was that Camden Council got in touch to explain that - as I'd feared - the funding situation is slightly more complicated than I'd said. To cut a head-hurting story short, it's true that Camden has found over £3 million from its recession recovery fund to fill the total £4 million hole left by the LDA's withdrawal, though only £200,000 of that is to keep the KCCTC going (the LDA had previously provided £300,000). A further £2.8 million is going towards maintaining Camden Working, the job brokerage also mentioning in Cllr Theo Blackwell's blog on this subject.
My excuse is that the LDA didn't understand its own documents, so why should I be expected to? Still, the basic story holds: the new, Boris-styled LDA has stopped providing funds for employment support programmes in Camden right at the start of a recession and someone else has had to pick up the bills. Which leads me to the second thing. The London branch of The Politics Show has followed up the Kings Cross story and interviewed Council leader Keith Moffitt. He's obligingly described the LDA decision as "utterly perverse". This may not endear him to his Conservative Deputy Andrew Marshall, who is also the Council's Executive Member for community development and planning. That isn't to say Marshall doesn't agree with him. I wonder if he does.
The Politics Show - watch it on Sunday from noon - will also take a look at the City Fringe project, another "pathways to jobs" scheme the LDA has chosen to forsake. "Value for money" is such a relative term, wouldn't you say?
