Northern Rock Foundation 2008 budget increases by £4m

The Northern Rock Foundation has announced a £4m increase on last year's cautious spending plans, creating a new budget of £11m for 2008.

As part of the Northern Rock bank’s nationalisation deal, Chancellor Alistair Darling decided, in February, that the foundation would receive an annual income of £15m over the next three years.

Trustees had allocated a little more than £1m to 15 organisations in north-east England and Cumbria in the first spending round for this year, and they plan to release details of additional funding in May.

Speaking about the new budget, Alastair Balls, chair of the Foundation, commented: “Last autumn, we took the difficult decision to scale back our programmes and we set an initially cautious budget for 2007 of £7m. We now know that there will be a continued donation from Northern Rock under its new ownership arrangements. This is excellent news and means we can increase our grant-making plans, initially by a further £4m.”