• A DECADE ago, a now departed council cabinet member endorsed the scheme whereby community centres paid rent to the council, took on self-repairing leases and paid 20 per cent of business rates.

The rationale was that centres remained closed in the evenings and at weekends and by forcing centres to pay these charges they would have to hire out premises to raise income.

Centres did get grants from the council which paid for some of these charges. Camden Council then boasted how much it made available to the voluntary sector, but neglected to say how much of this was clawed back.

Within the past four years at least three centres have gone bust owing rent, one reputedly £129,000. Fast forward to December 2021. An organisation which is not a charity was given the usage of a large building which had housed a nursery which the council had closed some months earlier.

My attempts to find out if it paid similar charges to community centres were repeatedly rejected, even by a local councillor. Eventually I got the answer by using the Freedom of Information Act. The organisation has not, indeed, paid rent or business rates, nor has a lease, although it has been in the large building for 18 months.

A nearby community centre has to pay some £80k a year for such charges and has a self-repairing lease. It also had to pay back these charges suspended during the lockdown even though it was running a food bank. The FoI response gave no reason for the freebie the organisation had.

As a former chair of a community centre, I question why this organisation gets free rent etc. Others do not, and why this simple fact has been kept secret for so long – gross incompetence, favouritism, or something more sinister?

MICK FARRANT, NW5