Food vouchers issued by TC funded by County, is licence required to distribute

Question

CC funding TC for TC to print and distribute a sheet of food vouchers with a finite value to be redeemed at designated local retailers in town for either meat products, vegetable products or bakery products (not chocolate products or hot products due to VAT complications), voucher has no cash value to user.

The voucher recipients are identified persons and not generally available to any member of the parish.

This process has to date been unchallenged, however, it has now been suggested that the TC, with GPC, is acting unlawfully and the practise must stop forthwith.

Has anyone any experience of similar practises supporting the vulnerable in their community and whether it is in fact unlawful?

Answer 1

Exactly who is it that has "suggested" that the council is acting unlawfully and specifically what is it that is unlawful?

Comments

Whilst I am grateful for the response, indeed those were precisely my initial comments, however, the reason for laying out the situation and concern raised was primarily to ask of the community if they had any experience of similar projects and whether they had fallen foul of any legislation that ceased their endeavour?

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Having respect for your position in this matter before anyone can respond it needs to be ascertained whether there is any basis for a "challenge" to the process and the the best route would be via the controlling council who I assume came up with ( and presumably ran it past their legal eagles) the scheme- Any doubts or concerns should be addressed to those parties.

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Hi LocumClerk, without knowing why it was suspected to be illegal, we can't really comment, unless someone is complaining that distributing funds from the County Council is a act / action that hasn't been agreed by the Council?

Our Parish Council provided a grant (£4,000) to social services early intervention team to support families in the village, this was a grant to them and not the individuals, to provide up to £200 per struggling family with resources (e.g. new cot, baby grow, taxi fares to parent and baby class), providing that a) we were given a description of what was provided b) they lived in the parish c) to report at the end of the year whether it had made a difference d) to never disclose to us who received it.

Audit were happy, the district were happy.

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Thank you for taking the time to respond, I shall share all the comments with the concerned party whom I have suggested they join this useful forum themselves.

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Ditto my recent offer of thanks, thank you.

Answer 2

There's a lot of Government money sloshing around at the moment for this sort of thing and the county councils are finding it difficult to target the funds effectively through their usual public interactions. My county has signed up a range of voluntary sector partners to act on their behalf. Our foodbanks are handing out vouchers and even cash to those in need.

There's nothing in local government legislation to prevent a parish or town council from partnering with another authority for a scheme such as this. The identification of suitable beneficiaries might be complicated, especially for a council that doesn't normally provide welfare support, but if this function is being carried out by others, what's the problem?