The decision to withdraw funding and thus close down, after 25 years of service to the community, Nottingham Community Resource Centre (NCRC) is totally misguided.

John Truscott, a practical services worker at Nottingham Community Resource Centre, makes the case against a city council decision to close the facility after 25 years

The decision has been taken in the face of unprecedented opposition from local voluntary and community groups across Nottingham.

But, even so, the senior representative of the Department of Leisure and Community Services, in a meeting with staff and management of the centre, admitted that he hadn't read the petitions and dozens of letters of support for NCRC that he had received before making his decision that the centre was to be axed.

From the information generally available it seems that the council are quoting two main excuses for their decision. The first is the failure to find funding for a project to set up a network of resource and information centres based in the more "under-provided" suburbs of Nottingham. However, this was the council's own favoured project and NCRC was only involved in that the council made it a requirement of their continued grant aid at the time that they did so. Now that the council has failed, after three years, to find any funding, it is NCRC that is being made the scapegoat. The council's Department of Leisure and Community Services was much the dominant partner in this failed enterprise but takes none of the blame. Both workers at NCRC are set to lose their jobs over this but nobody's job goes at the Department. "A fair society," I think Tony Blair might call this.

The second excuse given was that community groups in and around Nottingham that relied on the services and facilities provided under one roof at NCRC, and found its central location so convenient, can now access the same services from other places in and around the city. A report brought by the City Council to a recent meeting, to apparently "prove" this assertion, was quickly shown to be embarrassingly wrong and proved exactly the opposite. But phoney reports or no phoney report, the council is demonstrably wrong and the necessary alternative practical resources are simply not there.

Quite clearly the City Council's decision is not based on logic, economics, or indeed rationality. Nor is it based on any process of engagement or consultation with the community or the voluntary sectors despite the council's solemn, but seemingly hypocritical, undertaking to do so through the much-vaunted Voluntary Sector Compact. But with such blurred lines of responsibility (or is that "deniability") in the council these days, together with the erosion of democracy and accountability in local government, it will be difficult to know where to point the finger of blame for this botched decision. (Certainly the supply of dis-information by officers to councillors doesn't help.) What we do know is that if this goes ahead then a 25-year history of NCRC being a vital part of the community and voluntary sector in Nottingham will come to an end and many local organisations will be plunged into real difficulty now and many more in the future.