THE leader of a charity which has provided voluntary organisations for more than 30 years has said he is determined to carry on despite losing out on a £1.4m contract.

Keith Hall, chairman of Richmondshire Community and Voluntary Action, said he was “bitterly disappointed” not to have won the bid to continue to provide services including Colburn Community Café, community transport schemes and Hambleton and Richmondshire Disability Forum.

In 2016 a new competitive process for the funding provided to RCVA was introduced by North Yorkshire County Council and the North Yorkshire NHS Clinical Commissioning Groups.

The North Yorkshire Alliance of seven district-based independent support and development charities and volunteer centres worked closely together to put forward a collaborative bid to continue providing these services across North Yorkshire - but the three-year contract has been awarded to a new provider from April 1.

Mr Hall said: “The partnership worked extremely hard to put forward an ambitious, authentic and achievable proposal, based on our substantial past experience of providing support to charities and volunteers across the county.

“Our seven independent charities are member-led organisations based in our communities and it is a bitter disappointment to us that our bid was not selected.

“The impact of the loss of this significant amount of funding cannot be underestimated.

“RCVA trustees have had to make a difficult decision to end the delivery of projects, services and support resulting in staff redundancies and the loss of our well used community building.”

A county council spokesman said: “From April 1, Community First Yorkshire will be providing practical and strategic support to provide a vibrant voluntary and community sector across the county.

“The grant from the county council replaces previous, non-competitive arrangements established in October 2011, originally for 18 months and rolled forward annually every year since. The council carried out an in-depth review of the voluntary and community sector infrastructure in 2015-16 and in 2016 a new competitive process future funding of infrastructure support was introduced.

“Community First Yorkshire has been formed from a merger of Rural Action Yorkshire and North Yorkshire and York Forum.”