WITH around £15m to give away, the last five years have provided a fund of fond memories for Lord Derek Foster.

Tomorrow the former Bishop Auckland Labour MP will step down after five years as chairman of the North East committee of the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF).

The committee has an annual budget of £3m which, amid the current cuts, has never been more important – especially now that it has just been increased by £900,000.

In its 16-year lifetime, the HLF has awarded £214m to thousands of projects in the North East.

“It is an astonishing amount of money and the HLF has been an enormous benefactor to the North East,” said Lord Foster, who lives in Washington.

“Projects will be relying more and more on lottery money because of the cuts.”

The grants don’t have to be huge to make a significant difference to communities, although multi-million awards have restored a series of parks in the North East.

“The funding has been brilliant for our parks. I take my hat off to the Victorians and Edwardians who left us their parks legacy. I didn’t realise what we owed them,” said Lord Foster, a former chairman of the North of England Development Council.

The £2.4m award to help in the revival of Barnes Park in Sunderland, which officially re-opens in May, is one of Lord Foster’s favourite projects from his chairmanship.

As a boy, he walked through the park on a daily basis on the way from his parents’ corner shop to Bede Grammar School in Sunderland.