Case study: Plymouth City Council Crowdfunder Programme
In March 2015, Plymouth City Council set up Crowdfund Plymouth, in partnership with Crowdfunder UK, to distribute the ‘neighbourhood portion’ of the Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) to provide support for local projects, so-called the City Change Fund. The City Change Fund has been hugely successful, and in 2019, it won both the Engaged Cities Award from Cities of Service and the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) Silver Jubilee Cup. In 2021, the Council also won two RTPI Awards in the categories of ‘Excellence in Planning for Health and Wellbeing’ and ‘Excellence in Planning for the Natural Environment’ for the first Plymouth Climate Challenge LIVE event, an online event hosted in collaboration with Crowdfunder, which awarded additional funds to applicants and celebrated strong projects.
Since then, we have continued to refine the City Change Fund’s terms and conditions, assessment criteria, and governance, responding to the Council’s March 2019 declaration of a Climate Emergency and the rise in the cost of living, making it more transparent what projects can and can’t be funded.
To date, the fund has pledged over £1.4M across 180 projects, and the projects have made £2.4M in addition to these pledges, providing good value for money.
Why the Crowdfunder Platform?
We are now in our tenth year, although the process remains fundamentally unchanged. The council uses Crowdfund Plymouth to find out about local projects and to pledge up to 50 per cent of a project’s initial target, if they meet the legislation and the council’s criteria and priorities. Over the years, we have increased the amount we can pledge on projects and in 2020 the maximum the Council can pledge to a project was raised to £30,000.
When the Council was looking for the best way to distribute the City Change Fund, it considered other alternatives such as the council spending it with minimal consultation from the community or setting up a funding application process. Experience has shown that Crowdfund Plymouth continues to facilitate transparency in decision-making and demonstrate public buy-in by only allowing pledges towards a project when it has reached 25 per cent of the final target and has a large number of backers.
By transferring the money to CrowdfunderUK, it continues to streamline many of the internal administrative processes, enabling the Council to allocate more funds for projects rather than administration, and decisions continue to be made quickly.
The City Change Fund is managed internally by officers in the Council’s Strategic Planning and Infrastructure department. Decisions on whether projects meet the criteria are made by officers in consultation with the relevant ward councillors, portfolio holder and the senior leadership team. We keep an up-to-date website with our criteria and other information to help applicants. City Change Fund | PLYMOUTH.GOV.UK.
How the process has evolved
In March 2019, the Council declared a Climate Emergency and the City Change Fund introduced a new Climate Emergency Bonus. However, whilst the Climate Emergency Bonus was an incentive for projects to help deliver net zero by 2030, the number of projects the bonus benefited was limited. Therefore, it was decided that rather than offering a bonus, the Council would strengthen the assessment criteria regarding climate change meaning that all projects seeking a pledge from the City Change Found would now need to demonstrate how they are responding to the Climate Emergency.
In July 2023, due to the cost-of-living crisis, the assessment criteria was further reviewed and updated to allow projects to either help address climate change OR address the cost of living crisis.
Whilst the Council has been hugely successful in distributing funds and the City Change Fund has continued to grow in popularity due to its award-winning status, we have now seen a significant slowdown in the funds we are receiving from the ‘neighbourhood portion’ of CIL. This is likely due to several factors including BREXIT and the COVID-19 pandemic, which have slowed development across the city. Because of this, the Council made some changes in 2023 to how the fund is managed by introducing a monitoring system with ‘trigger points’ to ensure an adequate cash flow going forward based on a traffic light system:
– Green – the Council has more than £100,000 of CIL funds available.
– Amber – the Council has less than £100,000 of CIL funds available and projects should be aware that money is running low.
– Red – the Council has less than £50,000 of CIL funds available and so will pause funding on projects for a minimum of 3 months and review. The fund will then reopen once there is again at least £100,000 in the City Change Fund pot.
Finally, we provide a yearly report of the City Change fund showing the projects and what money has been pledged as well as what money has been generated for full transparency.
