A REQUEST for £10,000 of Mary Portas funding to be transferred to the Love Ledbury group has been firmly refused by town councillors.

This means that community groups who applied for funding to Love Ledbury's grant application panel must now await the decision of the town council instead.

Love Ledbury, which runs the public toilets in Bye Street, recently invited community-based applications for Mary Portas funding: even though the £10,000 was actually held, and remains held, by the town council.

Cllr Liz Harvey, a member of Love Ledbury, said this week: "The situation is potentially very serious for the groups awarded the funding. Who knows how long it will be before the council stops using these monies as a political football?

"I have no idea what the clerk and councillors are playing at in refusing to release the monies for distribution. They have spent the last four years saying the Portas money is nothing to do with the council every time anyone asked about it, and now they are refusing to allow it to be distributed."

Cllr Harvey added: "The money was actually awarded to the Portas Bid Team - which was made up of local people some, but not all of whom, were members of the Town Plan Steering Group. The bid was undertaken at a time when the council was refusing to recognise the Steering Group as anything to do with the town council.

"So it’s doubly baffling to have the clerk assert the Portas Bid is somehow the council’s business at this late stage and after so much political capital has been made by councillors over the delays we have faced in disbursing the funds while waiting for a youth drop-in to get off the ground."

The Portas Money was transferred from Herefordshire Council, which received it, to the safe-keeping of the town council.

The decision to refuse the release of Portas money funds from the town council to Love Ledbury was taken at last month's annual town council meeting, when the clerk, Karen Mitchell, advised that "as the source of the Portas funds was public monies, it would be subject to audit, and Herefordshire Council would need to be assured that the funds were being administered properly".

Councillors voted by ten votes to two not to transfer the money to Love Ledbury.

Bob Barnes, chairman of the town's finance and general purposes committee, saw no reason why Portas funding for the youth drop-in centre, at the Elizabeth Barratt Browning Institute, should not go ahead.

He said: "Youth organisations in the community were part of the original Portas Bid, so that should not be in question; but we want proper clarification about the other applications as well.

"We are not withholding the money. We want clarification of the applications before the money can be issued, by the town council."

The Ledbury Reporter understands that five or six other community-based projects are seeking funding and that one of them is a community gardening group, which is not Ledbury in Bloom.