A new plan has been hatched which offers, for the first time, some real tangible help to charities like Naomi House caught in the Icelandic banking failure.
Steve Brine, the Prospective Conservative MP for Winchester says the Conservatives in Parliament are backing a short-term Treasury loan to help sound charities.
- Steve Brine TV - See a short-film made recently on a visit to Naomi House by Steve Brine and Maria Miller MP. www.stevebrine.tv
Steve told The Hampshire Chronicle; “Naomi House has done brilliantly since this crisis emerged, achieving constant publicity and bringing the issue to the heart of Government through the efforts of the charity itself, Winchester’s current MP and I hope the more than ten thousand people who signed my petition on the Downing Street website. All of this was to try and hold Ministers to their promise, made here in Winchester by Harriet Harman, that the Government will ‘not leave these charities on their own’. I feel very strongly however, that the campaign needs to move on now and that’s why I have been working very hard behind the scenes with my colleagues in Parliament to see if we can deliver real targetted help.
“Up until this point the Treasury has done nothing for the significant number of charities, of which our own Naomi House is one, who have lost money in the Icelandic Bank failure. So charities like Naomi House face having to cut back on the good work they do - just when it is most needed and we have already seen the announcement from Naomi House in cutting back their ‘Hospice at Home’ service. That is why we’re supporting the principle of a short-term Treasury loan fund to help sound charities, which face genuine hardships as a result of lost bank deposits.
"We are now challenging Ministers to work with us and develop a cross-party consensus on a measure that will have minimal cash-flow impact on the Treasury and deliver real help to a vital sector of society. This is not the whole answer to the problem faced by Naomi House, they still don’t have access to their money and there are still other avenues such as the Primary Care Trust being explored, but I hope we can make it a reality in the short-term to at least be part of the solution.”