Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Cawsey.]

I welcome the opportunity to return to an issue that I have debated on a number of occasions, most recently in an Adjournment Debate about three years ago, when I made the case for community and village halls that have suffered a funding gap for essential repairs to buildings, many of which were constructed during the first and second world wars and are fundamental to the communities they serve. Over the past couple of years, and especially over the past six months, I have been pressing the case that lottery funding should be made available.

That was the case I wanted to make in my Adjournment debate. Clearly, the Government and the lottery fund have been listening, because yesterday it was announced that about £50 million would be made available over the next three years, which I very much welcome. I have been corresponding on the issue with the Big Lottery Fund and with Ministers for some time, as the Minister knows, and the funding will mean a big change for a large number of village halls and community facilities throughout the country.

There has been a funding gap. Although specific money has been available for new facilities, such as those for the disabled, and money has been available for projects in community and village halls, such as education, training and information technology, there has been a significant lack of the capital resources that are essential for the renewal of buildings. Although I welcome the announcement of the new funding, and suspect that the Adjournment debate may have helped, I still want to raise some issues that arise from it.

To give some context, I shall give a current example from my Constituency. Veryan parish hall, like most such halls, was built some time ago; in this case, by the British Legion in 1926. More recently, a benefactor bought it and presented it to Veryan parish council and it operates as a charity serving the community. The activities that take place are typical for halls of that sort: scouts and guides, pantomimes, yoga, women's institute meetings, plant sales and all sorts of community events. However, kitchen and office facilities are limited and there is no small meeting room of the sort that are in such short supply in those communities. The building fabric needs renewal. As buses to the main town do not run after 6 pm, people without transport have to rely on such facilities.

Such community halls are especially prevalent in Cornwall, which has many small villages and towns, whereas most counties have larger towns and cities. Like many similar community halls and facilities, Veryan hall applied for a grant from the lottery fund to improve the kitchen, parking, access—in accordance with the provisions of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995—and other parts of the hall. The application was backed by Cornwall rural community council, the parish council and other local community groups.

All that work was done by volunteers, and after going through a complicated process, with visits from financial officials, and having received positive feedback, they were told that they did not meet the funding criteria because the area was not deprived enough. That is ironic as Cornwall is recognised as the poorest county in the country, but its rural communities do not fill many of the tick boxes for deprivation, such as low car ownership. It is almost impossible to exist in those communities without a car. Another reason was that not enough people from an ethnic minority would benefit from the funding. Those criteria would rule out most village halls in Cornwall.

Although it is important that lottery funds are awarded against fair criteria in each case, it was felt that they are stacked against rural applications. The county was not thought to be poor because it did not have the same problems as urban areas but, perhaps most important, no funding is really designed to help decaying village halls with basic maintenance and renewal, as opposed to individual projects. That is the issue that I have been raising in meetings with Ministers and others over the years. The Veryan community, like many others, has raised a lot of money—about £80,000 towards the total project cost of £190,000—but it is insufficient. It has done a great job raising money but it has no one to turn to.

The announcement has been made that funds will be available. The Government have much more control over the Big Lottery Fund than over predecessor funds and although we have been told that details of who and what will be eligible will not be announced until next year, will the Minister give some idea of how the funds are to work? Most important, how far will they be earmarked for the renewal of existing infrastructure rather than having to meet the peculiar criteria —that projects should provide new facilities or activities—that have existed since the useful millennium fund?

The press release is somewhat unclear. It talks about not only the renewal of community buildings and village halls, but new beneficiaries. That issue goes to the heart of whether the fund will produce what we need in Cornwall. An improved hall may have new beneficiaries—of course, more people are likely to use it—but the key thing is that people often want to keep existing facilities for their communities groups. If they must show that there will be new users or that there will be a major change in the kind of facility on offer, many of them will struggle to do so. After all, funding has been available for the existing uses until now.

I hope that the Minister will give a feel for the direction that the fund is intended to take. I also hope that he will address a broader concern that I raised during the last Adjournment debate on the issue, when the Minister gave a quite positive response, but little has happened since. It is a wider concern about the complications of the funding process that the people who operate village halls and community facilities must undertake. Although they are largely volunteers, they are expected to navigate their way through a wide variety of different funds. For some funds, they must go to the South West of England Development Agency; for others, they must go to other regional development agencies, the Big Lottery Fund, the Heritage Lottery Fund or the Local Government Association, each of which may have funds available but only if certain criteria are met. For example, the RDA places funds only where the beneficiaries can illustrate economic outputs. So the RDA could help to fund a new computer suite to train local people, but not provide funds to repair a leaking roof.

The process is complicated and people are uncertain about where to go for funding, despite the fact that organisations such as the rural community councils do a very good job in signposting. It would be enormously helpful if something could be done to simplify the cocktail of possibilities and enable volunteers to gain access to funds more easily.

As my hon. Friend will be aware, in my career before joining the House I was a regeneration officer for Carrick district council and much of my role was devoted to helping local community groups bid for funding. Is he aware of the bureaucracy that those voluntary groups must go through and the difficulty that many of them experience simply processing the very many forms involved in finding out whether they are eligible for any funding?

My hon. Friend is right to suggest that there is never a single pot or a single entry point, given the nature of government these days, but one or two counties have experimented with a single front door into the various funds. There has been an organisational pulling together of the opportunities. As development work is ongoing and liaison is taking place with organisations such as ACRE—Action with Communities in Rural England—I hope that there will be an effort to discover whether it is possible not just to provide funding through the Big Lottery Fund to renew such infrastructure, but to make the process more simple when those largely voluntary organisations seek to access the wide range of relatively small amounts of funding. We all know what community groups must do to get their new roof or to get their new project under way. They must put together a jigsaw puzzle of different, sometimes small funding pots that add up to the necessary total.

I hope that the Minister will be able to tell us some of the details and that he can indicate that work is being done to improve access to the funds. However, the announcement covers £50 million over three years. If that scale of money is made available regularly, it will allow the renewal of village halls over time. No one suggests that all the renewal will take place in two or three years. In 2002, a study estimated that the backlog of necessary repairs was worth some £400 million, and there is no reason to think that that figure will have declined since then. In that context, I hope that the Minister will recognise that it is also important that the funding should roll on into the longer term. I appreciate that it is unlikely that firm commitments can be made today, but I hope that the Minister will give me some indication that it is recognised that a one-off, three-year £50 million fund will not tackle the problem once and for all any more than the similarly sized millennium fund did. Some £50 million went into village and community halls through that fund. It was very welcome and made a huge difference, but unfortunately such buildings do not stop ageing, so the need for renewals does not stop. I hope that there will be some indication of a willingness to address the matter.

The new licensing Laws have been discussed before, but I want to talk about the way in which they will affect community groups and village halls that are operated by volunteers. The Minister will be aware that a lot of campaigning has taken place on the requirement for community and village halls to have a specifically licensed individual if they hold more than 12 events a year involving alcohol. In the past it was possible to apply to magistrates before each individual event, and realistically, few community or village halls hold only 12 events involving alcohol a year. During a wedding party, fête or amateur-dramatics event, one can almost guarantee that a bottle or glass of wine will be on offer, or be available to be won, but that requires a licence holder. Parties that local people put on—even, dare I say it, Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat events—tend to attract a bottle of wine or two along the way.

I suspect that the Minister will say that most halls have managed to get their applications for licences in, which is true, but the problem is persuading volunteers to take on responsibilities that they perceive as possibly onerous. There has been an enormous effort to comply with the new laws and although not all halls have managed to do so, the Majority have. However, people involved in those halls tell me that they had to twist arms to get volunteers to take on the responsibility and that it is extremely difficult to persuade people to do so. They think that it will take only one or two events to go wrong, with people being held to account for that, before the volunteers will start to dry up.

I hope that the Minister will be able to go back to his colleagues to determine whether there is a way in which such community facilities, given the wide variety of organisations that use them and the voluntary nature of the people who run them, could be given a facility for licensing that made more sense and did not make people think that they were taking on legal liabilities beyond their capacity or willingness. If halls find that they increasingly run into difficulty attracting volunteers and are thus able to put on fewer facilities, their steady income stream from making bookings will go. That income is the fundamental way in which halls keep going from day to day.

I have not come here to criticise the Minister. I welcome the announcement that has been made, for which hon. Members on both sides of the House and I have worked for a long time. We have clearly been listened to and that is good news.

I thank Matthew Taylor for raising an important issue. The Big Lottery Fund must have noticed that he had secured today's debate and thus announced the £50 million funding—I do not know whether that is true or not. I am grateful for the opportunity to emphasise the fact that the House recognises the importance of village and community halls to the local services, well-being and necessary regeneration of rural communities.

We understand that funding for new or replacement halls must come for a vibrant partnership. As the hon. Gentleman said, that partnership is made up of each local community and district, with county, regional and national bodies. We welcome the superb work that the Big Lottery Fund has undertaken in helping village halls to continue to play a vital role in many communities throughout the land.

There are a wide number of reasons why village halls play such an important role in community life. The amenities that they provide are integral to the communities that they serve. They influence the survival of many community groups, local societies and interest societies. It is important that such groups continue to attract new members, and they improve the quality of life for many local residents. Furthermore, village halls increase community involvement and cohesion, so they need diverse community support to survive and to attract funding. When I was the licensing Minister, I responded positively to representations from Action with Communities in Rural England about the number of events in such venues. I am not au fait with all the details, but I will take up the points that the hon. Gentleman made with the Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, my hon. Friend James Purnell, who is now responsible for licensing.

Community halls are important, because they aid the provision of public services such as surgeries, outreach GP services, libraries, clubs and social events. As the Minister for Sport and Tourism, I am pleased that many of them offer physical activities and run walking clubs. I was in Cornwall only a few weeks ago and met members of a vibrant walking club who had ended a walk at the Eden project. Many of those clubs are being run from village halls, which is welcome.

Those are a few examples of the services that village halls provide and which reach out to communities, especially disadvantaged ones. Village halls provide a place for family learning, which encourages and enables lifelong learning and includes a wider range of activities and roles than those traditionally provided by libraries, as the hon. Gentleman mentioned. That service will help to develop the untapped potential of libraries, as village halls are uniquely placed to offer a focus for community activity and development by widening their traditional role and providing a true community resource. I am pleased to be able to highlight the fact that the national lottery has supported community and village halls in a number of ways, and there has been a huge amount of good work in this area. The hon. Gentleman spoke warmly about the role of the Millennium Commission, which provided £65 million, while the Community Fund has awarded over £138 million to community buildings since 1995. That funding was viewed in a very positive light. Other distributors have funded appropriate projects within their remit for village halls and community buildings.

Overall, the national lottery has awarded £258 million to village and community halls in the past 10 years. We would all agree that that impressive figure is evidence that the national lottery supports community buildings in a substantial and fundamental way. The Big Lottery Fund, as a major funder for communities, is building on the strengths and successes of what has gone before, as well as introducing exciting new approaches. Yesterday, as the hon. Gentleman said, the Big Lottery Fund announced that it will make £50 million available over three years through the community buildings programme to projects across England. That programme will focus solely on civil renewal. The hon. Gentleman asked me to spell out the criteria for that programme, but unfortunately I cannot do so because they have not been settled. The programme has been agreed in principle and it will become operational in 2006. I will, however, relay to the Government the points that he made about funding regimes posing difficulties for applicants.

I very much doubt whether we are going to disagree on anything tonight—that is the advantage of making an announcement before the debate. I hope the Minister agrees that, since the end of the millennium fund, the key thing that has fallen through the net is the renewal of the existing infrastructure. The press release appears to suggest that that is intended to be a major component, but I would be grateful if the Minister confirmed that he expects that to be the case

I do, because the criterion is civil renewal. There has been substantial investment in village and community halls. We need to build on that, and make sure that they maintain existing services. Moreover, the need for library and communication services needs to be reconsidered. Hopefully, the civil renewal criterion will enable us to ensure that village and community halls are kept in good repair and can offer further services. With the changing landscape in rural areas, we need to keep on top of that. It is important that there are not information haves and have-nots, and community halls can play a significant role in that. I do not disagree with the hon. Gentleman's remarks, and I will make sure that his points are conveyed to the Big Lottery Fund.

The National Lottery Bill, which is currently in Committee, will bring into being the Big Lottery Fund. Through that Bill we will establish a one-stop shop. I recognise the frustration experienced by many applicants, especially small organisations. We are trying to get the Big Lottery Fund to take responsibility for a clearing house or one-stop shop for all lottery funding. Such an arrangement will help smaller organisations in particular to access lottery money.

The lottery will continue to evolve in a number of ways. It will be able to give advice to organisations and offer loan facilities as well. That combination will assist smaller organisations to apply for lottery funding. The Government do not disagree with the principle of additionality, but sometimes we take it to the point where it militates against the involvement of other funding streams. When organisations such as the regional development agencies and local authorities are involved, we must be creative, while acknowledging that the lottery exists to provide additional funding. The additionality principle is important. I hope that what we are doing through the National Lottery Bill will allow more joined-up working of funding streams, remove frustration, add one-stop shops and achieve added value for the money going into schemes.

That is what we will be doing over the next few weeks. If the hon. Gentleman will convey that to his Front-Bench colleagues, particularly Mr. Foster, and encourage them to support the changes proposed by the Government, we will get through the Committee sooner than we would otherwise do. We will then be able to ensure that the Big Lottery Fund is delivering what Matthew Taylor wants, in time for his next Adjournment Debate.

Question put and agreed to.

Adjourned accordingly at eighteen minutes to Eleven o'clock.