NEW VILLAGE HALL UPDATE – 21 JAN 25

The NVH CIO Board held a meeting on 21 Jan 2025, with members of its sub-committee ‘Working Groups’, and the existing Village Hall Committee to discuss that we have not to date been successful with securing a significant grant to kick-start the building our much-needed new Village Hall. We had identified and prepared applications for two potential sources of substantial funding:

Community Ownership Fund (COF): Suspended on announcement of the general election; the Government’s Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities published an Update on COF Round 4 on 23 Dec 2024: ‘The Community Ownership Fund is now closed. There will be no further application windows on the COF programme.’

National Lottery – Reaching Communities Fund (NL): On 6 Jan 25 we heard from the NL SW Regional Team that our application was not successful. They recognised that we had invested a lot of time in submitting our bid (a big thank you to Mark Lindsey and Nigel Whybrow); and they recognised the strong level of experience that we have within our team. They also stated that they are making changes to Reaching Communities to fit with their new strategy and will announce our new funding criteria in Spring 2025. Given the substantial grants made to village halls over the past few years, including to those with relatively small catchment areas .. this suggests that the criteria have already changed somewhat. We wait to see the new funding criteria in Spring 2025 and will then look to see if we are in a position to submit a new application.

Despite these set-backs - the CIO Board and the Village Hall Committee will continue to work with the Parish Council, the County Council and the local community, to investigate and review all options that will assist in securing the required funding to deliver a new village hall for Christian Malford.

We will continue to keep the Village updated on a regular basis.