|
|
 |
| |
Let women’s centre dip into its funds
• IT was generous of the New Journal to give half a page last week to letters criticising me over funding for the Hopscotch Asian Women’s Centre. The letters were headed: “Spectacularly wrong over women’s centre” but they failed to show I was wrong at all.
I said Hopscotch seemed to have accumulated ample reserves from money provided by Camden Council. As of March 2006, in fact, those reserves stood at £292,050.
Nahar Choudhury, the director of Hopscotch, gave no figures in her letter, but elsewhere has said that by the end of the month the reserves are expected to be reduced to £169,000, which is still a comfy sum.
The biggest new spending commitment reducing the reserves is £90,000, which is attributed solely and a bit mysteriously to “development of services”. Councillors Nurul Islam, Roger Robinson and Anna Stewart accuse me of “little knowledge of basic bookkeeping” but I do know enough to realise that “development of services” could cover a multitude of sins.
Which services were claimed to have been “developed” has not been itemised in either of the deputation statements Camden Council received from Hopscotch.
Councillor Nasim Ali claims the £25,000 cut from Hopscotch’s funding in this year’s council budget “used to pay for a homelink worker”. Plainly, if Hopscotch wants to maintain its spending it can choose to do so using part of the remaining £169,000 it still has in its balances at the end of the current financial year. It can then provide evidence to Camden on the higher level of need it believes exists and will no doubt be sympathetically heard.
I have no argument about the high quality of the valuable work that Hopscotch does, and I am sure the council will want to commission more services from Hopscotch in the future.
I am therefore sorry that Mrs Choudhury should be “shocked” by what she calls the “personal nature” of my New Journal letter, especially as the letter did not even mention her or anyone else at Hopscotch (Women’s centre has plenty of cash, February 22).
I was replying to a letter from the three Labour councillors for St Pancras and Somers Town who claimed the £25,000 cut threatened Hopscotch’s vital services. I am happy that this is quite evidently not the case, so I hope they will now shut up.
CLLR FARUQUE ANSARI
(Lib Dem)
Town Hall, WC1
• PERHAPS Councillor Faruque Ansari is one of those Asian men who thinks women should be hidden behind a veil, subjugated to their men, and neither be seen nor heard…
Or perhaps those are the men whose votes he wants (never mind the women’s votes; if he is one of these he wouldn’t think about that). I hope he is not.
NAME AND ADDRESS SUPPLIED
|
 |
|
|
|
