All your compliments and your cutting remarks are captured here in quotation marks

A special prize for the person who guesses the lyric! Anyway a lengthy interview took place with the Government researcher in which I was asked to review the Neighbourhood Renewal approach warts and all. In a nutshell there is quite a lot of positives I report including a greater resident involvement in service planning and exploring the nuances in different geographical areas which will need to be addressed in different ways. Data collection is more precise. On the negative side a bemoan the fact that a programme which was designed for the long term dwindled into another short term intervention with the same sustainability issues as all the others. I criticise the process for failing to resource neighbourhoods with resources from NRF to undertake their own mini-commissioning exercises to buy in those additiona,l services where and when they were most needed. On the community engagement side there is a mixed report some great ideas but a failure of delivery expressed in successive cuts to CEN funding and an elimination of the small grants process which made so much happen at a neighbourhood level. I speak about the importance of The Firm Foundations model as a basis for community activism and the attempts we have made to get others to adopt this as a fundamental principle to engender action at a neighbourhood level. I speak about the frustrations of hitting my head against that particular brick wall and the collective failure to understand the relationship between NRF and mainstream spending in such a way as to be precise. At the moment some core services are running towards the edge of a cliff without the slightest idea of what will happen next. On the LSP itself I explore the good the bad and ugly in terms of its performance - or otherwise - as the Towns strategic vehicle. At best there is a genuine will to form a partnership approach and at worst it is superficial and naive with political posturing and figure skating over the surface of complex and multi faceted issues. Not sure what difference submitting into these research studies is but maybe the message might eventually get through. Wasn't it Albert Einstein who said "if we knew what we wer doing it would not be called research would it!!"