On Saturday 14th December several of the CCHL management committee met with Lizzi Collinge, our MP, to brief her on the situation with our pub and discuss how she can help, particularly with funding options for a community purchase.

She didn’t have anything concrete to tell us about a future Community Ownership Fund or equivalent but has been on the case with the relevant minister about us, The Sun Inn Dent, and others. She seemed to understand the issues and was very interested to discuss some of the related challenges such as population demographics, holiday lets, second homes and community decline (all big issues in Dent). We suspect she may well read at least some of our business plan as we pointed out it had quite a few useful local statistics.

We gave her contact details of the consultant we’ve been getting advice from via Plunkett UK so she could get in touch with them to try and get a better understanding of how many Community Benefit Societies across the country are stuck in the same position as us waiting for the Community Ownership Fund, and then get in touch with their MPs. She said that if a group of MPs representing different constituencies lobby a minister on the same subject they are more likely to get an answer.