In a way, I feel a bit sorry for LiveWire, the community interest company that was set up to provide leisure and library services for the council.

Like any public-facing organisation, it’s sometimes found itself in the public relations firing line (who can forget the ill-fated plan to close some of the town’s best-used libraries and replace them with Amazon-style lending lockers?)

Those proposals created a massive backlash. In the end, the council (let’s not forget the council is the real paymaster here) and LiveWire were forced to back down and libraries remained open.

While hopefully those travails are in the past, it’s certainly not all plain sailing for LiveWire, which brings us to another piece of bad news, the row over the so-called community cabin in Orford Park.

The LiveWire-run cabin has been occupied since September by a community group formed two years ago by some parents at Meadowside Community Primary School in Longford – the Friends of Meadowside. The group has subsequently organised projects including food banks, youth clubs, support groups and first aid courses.

Since being set up, volunteers have distributed nearly 70,000 meals to hungry families. The group signed a six-month tenancy agreement when it moved into the cabin in autumn and has supported more than 3,000 people in the area since.

But the ‘friends’ will have to leave its current base at the end of next month when its temporary, fixed-term lease comes to an end.

After what LiveWire describes as “an open and transparent tender and interview process”, the charitable organisation the Armed Forces Community Support Hub has been selected from “a number of very strong applications from a range of organisations”.

The Armed Forces group will take over in April. My understanding is the Friends of Meadowside also put in a bid but I can only assume it wasn’t as strog as the successful one, although I am not party to the criteria used to make the decision.

Meadowside group founder Mark Davies is understandably upset and said: “A woman came in in tears because she’d just found out we’re not going to be here any more.

“We have on average 30 to 35 people a day – if not more – coming in for help, welfare advice and food.

“These are OAPs, these are people on benefits who are struggling, these are families who’ve been sanctioned under Universal Credit.

“We can’t allow these people to go hungry, it’s wrong.”

There seems little doubt the Friends of Meadowside have provided a valuable and much-needed service for the people of Longford and Orford and it would be very easy to fall into the trap of castigating big, bad LiveWire.

But is LiveWire really to blame? I don’t think so.

LiveWire isn’t responsible for 10 or more years of austerity that’s driven people into poverty; it’s not to blame for Universal Credit or the cruel and unforgiving way it is sometimes implemented; it’s not to blame for the need for foodbanks or child and pensioner poverty.

LiveWire’s remit is to provide services as best it can within its available resources. And where does it get most of its money from? It gets it from the council, a council that has also seen its funding from government slashed over the past 10 years.

So yes, I feel desperately sorry for the people involved with the Friends of Meadowside and for those in need who rely on the Friends for support. I make no judgement whether the services the Friends provide is more or less worthy than the work carried out by the Armed Forces Community Support Hub but if you’re looking for a villain to blame, can I suggest you look elsewhere?

Maybe your anger should be directed towards the people who really control the purse strings and they are in Westminster, not Warrington.