National Lottery Community Fund (NLCF) chief executive David Knott has welcomed the government’s devolution agenda but wants it to extend beyond local government to civil society.

Speaking this week at an event on devolution in Westminster Knott said he backed the government’s “instinct to move power away from Westminster”.

The government is looking to strengthen the powers of mayoral combined authorities around issues such a tourism levies and transport. This extension of mayoral power is something that former Greater Manchester mayor, now MP, Andy Burnham has indicated he will bolster should he become Prime Minister this month as expected.

But Knott said the government needs to “make sure that decision-making and planning power travels well beyond institutions and reaches directly into neighbourhoods, networks and civil society”.

He said: “We more than agree - the people's money must go into the heart of communities…So when it comes to urgent and meaningful reform, we're all in.”

He added that “better decisions are made when local knowledge and experience is treated as integral intelligence. That's how we rebuild trust, strengthen democracy, create a more preventative and participatory society - and make national renewal happen”.

In his speech Knott he urged all public bodies and funders to “keep working with organisations that already hold trust in people's lives, and before a crisis arrives” s well as fund “long-term capability as well as projects with short reporting cycles”.

He added that the NLCF intends “to play a different, bigger role” in involving communities in funding decisions and “be much more active, and deliberate, about fixing the problem with our current funding model”.

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