A charity providing the only outside contact for dozens of elderly and vulnerable residents is on the brink of closure – receiving just enough council funding to limp on until after the election.

Staff working for Friends in St Helier (Fish) have been given redundancy notices and organisers are furious the charity is being given a stay of execution in the form of a “paltry” three-month grant until the end of May.

Merton Council’s Conservative administration has dismissed accusations that funding Fish until just after the May 6 election was politically motivated.

But the charity claimed it was intentionally being left to “waste away” after the authority last year decided to slash its grant by half – from £50,000 to £25,000 a year – and fears it will close before a decision over future funding arrangements could be decided at the end of May.

More than 100 elderly residents on the St Helier estate receive regular free hot meals, social care and supervised trips into the community organised by staff and volunteers based in Yenston Close.

Fish secretary Mary Curtin said: “This organisation should be the jewel in the crown for any local authority. Closure would confine some of Merton’s most vulnerable to their homes without any social interaction and would mean a bigger overall bill for social services.”

Violet Jennings, 80, said: “No family lives near me and I’ll never get out if it shuts. I don’t know what I’ll do.”

Ann Marston, 87, added: “We won’t have anyone to take us to the shops or speak to. It’s a godsend for so many and coming here is something we look forward to.”

Merton Council’s cabinet member for adult care services and health, Councillor Maurice Groves, said: “The whole grant funding process for community groups such as Friends in St Helier is very much led by the voluntary sector itself through Merton Voluntary Service Council and is in no way politically motivated. Indeed we are moving to a three-year funding process which gives voluntary organisations a level of security they’ve never enjoyed before.

“The timetable was agreed between the council and the local voluntary sector in January this year and has not changed. It was the voluntary sector itself which requested existing funding to organisations like Fish be rolled forward for three months until June 2010.”