Examination of witnesses (Questions 80
- 91)
TUESDAY 14 MARCH 2000
MR STEPHEN
DUNMORE and MR
RICHARD HILL
80. Can you give me an indication of who the
award partners are?
(Mr Hill) We can let the Committee have a note of
the organisations who attended our briefings for potential award
partners. There are around 40 to 50 of those. I think we would
be loathe to single out particular organisations at this point,
given that the deadline for receipt of applications is not until
the end of March. We can give you a complete list of organisations
who have expressed interest.
81. Would you think 40 would be a substantial
number?
(Mr Hill) I think our view is that there is a substantial
amount of interest in the scheme to be national award partners.
I do not think it is likely that we will have that many award
partners at the end of the day, it will be fewer, and then individual
and local organisations will have a range of award partners that
they can bid to for individual schemes. I think we are pleased
with the amount of interest.
(Mr Dunmore) May I just add that we may well ask some
of the award partners when they bid to us to actually join together
and work together in a single scheme because there seems potential
for that. That increases, I think, the options for joined up working.
It is worth adding, perhaps, also, that of the award partners
who attended the briefing which my colleague just referred to,
there are a very broad range of different bodies there. Some are
voluntary sector national organisations, for example, we very
much welcome that, and others are Government agencies of various
sorts who have been involved in this sort of work previously.
82. Do you have a practical example of the success
of the award partnership?
(Mr Dunmore) My colleague mentioned Millennium Greens
and I think that is a good example and that is generally regarded
as having been a successful scheme. Just very briefly, under that
scheme the Millennium Commission made £10 million available
to a £20 million package to set up a series of Millennium
Greens across the country. They did that working with the Countryside
Agency, the Countryside Commission as then was, as an award partner.
83. Do you intend to adopt a similar approach
with your other programmes on health and education?
(Mr Dunmore) I think the answer to that is that it
is horses for courses. With our first six initiatives we have
adopted different approaches according to the particular initiative
that we have got. We have some open grant programmes. Open grant
programmes have disadvantages in that you get a lot of disappointed
customers and you may get people who are putting in a lot of abortive
work if those schemes are not successful. That applies to any
competitive scheme. Equally, competitive schemes can encourage
people to be innovative about what they are doing. We have some
open grant programmes, we have got some allocation programmes,
for example in terms of the cancer machinery that we have allocated
to hospital trusts. We have got this programme, of course, where
we are intending to work with award partners. We have another
programme which is ICT Training for Teachers where we work in
partnership with schools and councils to deliver that and, again,
that is on an allocation basis. Depending on what the Government
gives us for our new tranche of initiatives we will decide what
is the most effective way of delivering those, following the sort
of consultation with a wide range of partners that my colleague
described.
Mrs Ellman
84. How do you see the balance of powers and
responsibilities between the national award partners and yourselves?
(Mr Dunmore) As we move through to the second stage
of the bidding process we will want obviously to end up with the
sort of balance in the programme that I have described already.
Also, through the contracts we will run, we will want to be very
specific about what the programme is that they are going to deliver
and about the outputs of that programme, what they have to do
for us, and about the sort of reporting back that they have got
to go through in order to satisfy our need to demonstrate value
for money from the programmes. We will be keeping a very close
eye on what is going on. Equally, I think we do not want to constrain
them too far and we want to give them the ability to deliver effectively
at the grass roots level. To do that they will need to work with
partners at that sort of regional and local level.
85. Has anybody come forward to deliver the
parks project looking at the Green Spaces programme?
(Mr Dunmore) It is too early to say because we have
not got any of the bids back in yet.
86. Are there any indications if there is any
organisation?
(Mr Dunmore) I think there are organisations there
and I do not think we want at this stage—for obvious reasons
because we are in the tender process—to name names. There
are national organisations there which have a track record in
delivering projects, as I said before, around green spaces, particularly
at the smaller end of the market.
87. Would you consider the Heritage Lottery
Fund to be an appropriate organisation.
(Mr Dunmore) Yes. From the beginning on this initiative,
because we did not want to duplicate or overlap, we have had very
detailed discussions with Heritage Lottery Fund. Indeed, I should
say that when we are looking at the award partner bids, because
of the interface between the work that they do and the work that
we do, we will very much involve them in the assessment process.
I do not know at this stage whether they will come forward with
a proposition themselves, it will be open to them to do so.
88. They would be eligible?
(Mr Dunmore) Yes.
Mr Benn
89. Has your thinking on green spaces changed
in any way since you first outlined your thoughts in November
1998?
(Mr Dunmore) I think it has not changed substantially.
I think what may have changed between the consultation document
we issued at that time and the guidance which we issued to award
partners more recently is that there is more specificity about
the themes, the four themes in England. The policy directions
were written very much in terms of sustainable development and
a very broad definition of the sorts of things we can do, although
a lot of examples were mentioned. In discussion with partners,
and in discussion with Government Departments, we tried to tie
the programme down a bit more and ended up with the four themes
which you will be familiar with. Yes, I think we have become more
specific about what the programme is about, although I still think
it is fairly broad ranging.
90. Finally, has there been any delay in getting
your awards partners up and running?
(Mr Dunmore) No. So far we have been able to stick
to the timetables that we set out at the beginning of the process
in our consultation document. I have to say that award partners
have not been slow in coming forward from the beginning to have
discussions with us. As you will know this is a very heavily populated
area in terms of different interest groups. I think the simple
answer to your question is no there has been no delay. We have
stuck to the timetable and we intend to stick to the timetable
in the future that we set out in the guidance.
Chairman
91. How far are you satisfied that Lottery money
has been spread fairly across the country? John Cummings' question
was the coal fields have lost out. Are you really looking on the
one hand at the worth of the project and secondly at some sort
of fair distribution across the country?
(Mr Dunmore) Speaking solely for us as a distributor
rather than Lottery distributors generally, we have two injunctions
to us from the Government in terms of distribution of our resources.
One is that we should get a reasonable spread across the country,
in other words in terms of the coal fields, for example the East
Midlands should not be getting less than anywhere else for no
obvious reason, which has sometimes been the case in the past.
Secondly, we are asked to target specifically on disadvantaged
communities. Now some people might say that those two things contradict
each other but I do not actually think they do. You can get a
reasonable spread across the country and target on disadvantage
within that sort of framework. I think what all Lottery distributors
are thinking about, and certainly we are all the time, is how
we can most effectively target on disadvantage and whether we
do that by targeting on particular geographical areas that are
identified through the usual indices, or whether we do that working
with partners locally and rely on them to set the strategic context
at that level and tell us what the priorities are in meeting the
particularly intense needs in their area. I think there are different
ways of doing it and we have done it differently for different
initiatives. What we will do as we proceed is to keep a very close
eye on the distribution of our funding. We can take corrective
action if we need to, either working with partners in an informal
way and saying "Look, gaps have been identified here, can
you do some work on our behalf to try and bring forward suitable
applications or suitable schemes" or indeed we have a power
in the Act to solicit applications if that seems reasonable for
us to do so.
Chairman: On that note, can I thank you very
much indeed.
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