This is the almost final draft of our ‘community asset transfer’ application to NHS Lothian for a community purchase of Belhaven Community Garden. At the end of April, we shared this with the panel that NHS Lothian have set up to consider our application and we are currently waiting for them to set a date for meeting with us to discuss this. At this meeting, we hope that we can agree on a valuation of the site as well as discussing any any further information that they feel is needed so as to ensure that our final application can be ‘validated’ quickly after formal submission.
Apart from this ‘community asset transfer’ application, our formal submission will include a range of supporting documents including the Business Plan that we have produced with the help of Community Enterprise, as well as all the letters and other evidence of community support for community ownership.
Once our application has been validated, NHS Lothian will have six months in which to consider our request and reach a decision. The legislation assumes that Public Bodies will “agree to a request unless there are reasonable grounds for refusing it.……In reaching its decision the authority must consider the reasons for the request and the information provided in the request and in support of the request, and compare the benefits of the community transfer body‘s proposals with the benefits that might arise from any alternative proposal.”
Given that any ‘alternative proposal’ must be considered against the same criteria used to assess our application, including how it will promote or improve economic development, regeneration, public health, social and environmental wellbeing etc., we are confident that our proposal offers ‘best value’ compared to selling the land for housing development. However, we will need to wait and see how it is assessed by the NHS Lothian panel.