Commendable but...

I note that the Thames Valley PCC and Chief Constable have announced on 2 June: Police property act fund launches to support voluntary and community groups. You can read more details here. As the website says:

The Fund, which is jointly managed by the PCC and the Chief Constable, is created from money recovered by the police and the proceeds from the sale of items that cannot be returned to identified owners, which includes seizures from criminals.

This year the PCC and Chief Constable expect to allocate around £200,000 and applications are invited from local voluntary and community groups who contribute towards reducing crime and/or whose work supports the PCC’s Police and Crime Plan objectives.

This is highly commendable. However... the website goes onto to say:

The closing date for this round of applications is midnight on Sunday 22nd June 2014 and applications will be considered jointly by the Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) and the Chief Constable.

So that is just under three weeks to respond to what are quite a few questions on the application pages (see here), and not least make the decision to apply in the first place.

In my experience, 3rd sector organisations are by their very nature, reasonably informal collections of voluntary and some paid workers who juggle many challenges and demands. And so I think 3 weeks is too tight a deadline - especially, as I suspect, many local bodies won't get to hear about this until it is too late. Which is a great pity as this is a good idea to use such funds in this way...

So Mr Stansfeld and CC Thornton... how about extending the time limit to (at least) a month later and so give more organisations a chance to organise themselves and make a good application for these funds?