I am writing to thank your reporter Annie Riddle for her piece in last week’s Journal on the public unease at the way in which the community Area Grant scheme is working. I was not at the area board but a highly respected trustee in the voluntary sector locally described it to me as the most shambolic meeting he had ever attended.

What members of the public, and perhaps even some councillors, may not realise is that in the present climate in which cuts are being imposed by Wiltshire Council, officers are deflecting the protests of groups affected by telling them to apply for community grants to meet the established need for the projects that are being cut.

Groups then discover the very restrictive criteria that the council has imposed on community grants, not always understood by officers or councillors, means that they are either not eligible or are turned down. You do not need the prejudice and ignorance being displayed by some of our local councillors about community projects to still further bring the system into public disrepute. Sadly the people who are suffering under this are just those most committed to work for a civil society.

Like the people spoken to by your reporter, I expect to make a bid for a grant and therefore must ask you that if you publish this letter you do so anonymously.

Name and address withheld

Community projects are created to bring people together, often in part to help fight fears that are held by not understanding another person’s point of view or way of life. So to read that a source of community project funding should itself be held in such fear that people are reluctant to be named lest a future grant application be jeopardised makes for sad reporting indeed.

All area board members have a responsibility in their position as ‘guardians of public funds’ but it needs to be tempered with discretion, humanity and a little common sense; without which, I fear, many local projects will fall by the wayside.

Neil Leacy, Salisbury