Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100
- 119)
MONDAY 8 DECEMBER 2003
JANET BIBBY,
STEPHEN JOHNSON,
GERALD OPPENHEIM
AND MARK
MCGANN
Q100 Mr Cummings: You have
provided the Committee with extremely long lists and descriptions
of the projects you fund, which do appear to be mainly one-off
capital grants. Do not the areas in which you are involved require
sustained revenue funding over a longer period, in order for those
schemes to be successful?
Mr Oppenheim: I think there is
a mix of funding that goes in. It depends partly on the Lottery
distributor that is making the award, some will have more of an
emphasis on capital than others. Certainly you are right, Mr Cummings,
the emphasis does need also to be on revenue support, and pretty
well all the grants that the Community Fund makes available do
go to groups to help them employ a member of staff, meet their
running costs for up to three years, with a possibility of renewal
for another three after that. I think the important point to make
as well is that Lottery funding, through the directions that all
the distributors have from Government, from the Department for
Culture, Media and Sport, which is our sponsor Department in Government,
does put the emphasis on supporting projects. Inevitably, that
means there is a tension between supporting projects and supporting
continuing costs.
Q101 Mr Cummings: Is it emphasis,
or is it more instructions?
Mr Oppenheim: It is an emphasis,
I think, it is not an instruction, but it does depend very much
on the programmes that each individual Lottery distributor runs.
Q102 Mr Cummings: Have you
thought about challenging the Government by providing revenue?
Mr McGann: The Lottery in 1998
was redesigned so that Lottery distributors could fund revenue.
Something we have recognised in the New Opportunities Fund is
the tension between short-term funding and long-term needs. Through
the Fair Share initiative, the Fair Share Trust, we have provided
funding, albeit modest funding, over a ten-year period, so each
year there is a predicted amount of money for communities, including
many coalfield communities.
Q103 Mr Cummings: Did they
redraw the plan?
Mr McGann: Yes, absolutely.
Ms Bibby: In terms of the Trust,
we are funded ourselves only in three-year tranches of funding,
therefore it is very difficult to build in long-term sustainability
for groups' funding. However, what we do have are regional managers
who work with groups on the ground to look at the sustainability
of projects before we fund them.
Q104 Andrew Bennett: Basically,
the coalfield areas are not getting a fair deal, are they, out
of the Lottery money? They spend a lot of Lottery money, and when
you look at the constituencies up and down the country which get
the least money about half of those are in the coalfields, either
because there is not the capacity for people to make bids, or
there is discrimination against the coalfield areas. They are
not getting a fair deal, are they?
Mr Oppenheim: I think the statistics
show that contention certainly was true, if you go back to 1997,
coalfield communities were doing less well per head of population
than pretty well any other community you care to define, by geography
or type of community. The figures I am aware of from the Department
of Culture, looking right across Lottery funding, not just those
of us who are here today, show that in 1997 the funding was about
£19 per head of population and that is up now to £36,
£37, so we are moving in the right direction.
Q105 Andrew Bennett: We have
got a long way to go, have we not?
Mr Oppenheim: I agree absolutely
with that point, certainly.
Q106 Mr Cummings: Are you
providing assistance for applicants to fill in the forms, the
complications that arise out of filling in forms?
Mr Oppenheim: Yes, we do.
Q107 Mr Cummings: I see a
big difference between someone living in Selly Oak, someone with
a great deal of professionalism, and someone living in a very
small mining village, who is doing it part-time?
Mr Oppenheim: Yes, we do that.
We run very regular surgeries to help applicants fill in forms,
to take their questions, help them through the problems. We cannot
fill in the forms for them, at the end of the day, because there
is a question of fairness across all the people who apply for
funds, but we do put a lot of effort into surgeries and one-off
help.
Mr McGann: At the New Opportunities
Fund, we are moving away from application methods of distribution.
For instance, we have used a lot of partners locally but also
we have allocated money to certain areas, which often has been
skewed to take account of disadvantage. We have found that works
quite well in saying to an area, "You've got this much money
if you develop a proposal," and, of course, we can help develop
that proposal. I think, historically, you are absolutely right,
that the Lottery has tended to support disproportionately the
people who are good at filling in forms, but I do think the figures
are showing it is changing for the better across the piece.
Ms Bibby: At the Trust, it is
a fundamental part of our provision, and, what is more, throughout
the life of a grant we have an in-house grants team who work with
a problem-solving approach throughout the life of the grant to
make sure that the group are supported.
Mr Johnson: One of the things
that we have found is that simplification of what we do has been
one of the watchwords. Certainly it has been one of the things
that people in coalfields, or people in all sectors of life actually,
have said is something that we, the Lottery distributors, ought
to be doing, and I know we have tried very hard to simplify some
of our processes. There has got to be a process when you are applying
for public money.
Q108 Mr Cummings: What sort
of monitoring systems do you have to ensure that you are making
a difference to local communities?
Mr Oppenheim: There are a number
of ways of doing this. There are individual relationships with
individual organisations that hold grants, and I think all the
distributors will have in place monitoring systems to track what
is happening, to see if the project that was bid for is being
delivered in the way that everybody hoped it would be. Then, on
a much larger scale, there are some evaluation studies that go
on over time to measure and research what happens on the ground,
so that we can all have a better idea of the difference being
made.
Ms Bibby: I think that is right
to say that we have a number of monitoring systems, as everyone
would have. CRT currently is having an evaluation project undertaken
by York Consulting. I spoke to the consultants this morning, who
gave me some emerging, positive themes which suggest that CRT
is filling a gap which other funders are not meeting, and there
is evidence that the CRT investment could be perceived as regeneration
risk capital available at a local level.
Q109 Christine Russell: I
was just writing down what you were saying there, Janet. You were
saying that actually you fill a gap which other funders do not,
because the question I was going to ask you is what do you do
that the local authorities are not doing? How are you different?
Ms Bibby: I think, the local authorities,
by their very nature and the statutory provision which they have
to provide, it means that they have a bureaucracy, quite rightly.
The Trust was set up to be flexible, to be able to move quickly,
and a good example of that is our position in the Selby Task Force,
in the way we were able to help avoid the 90-day rule come into
play to make the payments, and we were the only organisation which
could do that. Unfortunately, local authorities have departmental
silos, and I do not mean that in a detrimental sense, it is part
of the way services are provided. Something like the Trust is
able to cross-cut across departmental agendas, and I am thinking
particularly of the way that we meet the Department of Health
agenda, in looking at innovative respite care, the way that we
look at the skills agenda, with our investment in the SKILLSbuilder
programme, and the way that we look at the Home Office agenda,
for example, in Regenerate, our youth focused programme.
Q110 Christine Russell: Can
I ask you three gentlemen, in your experience working in the coalfield
communities, how proactively engaged are the local authorities
in working with and encouraging community and voluntary groups
to put together bids to your organisations?
Mr Johnson: I am not sure I can
answer the question about how proactively all local authorities
engage, I think it is some and some. Obviously, you get some local
authorities which have got more of a capacity to do that than
others. All I can say is that we cannot act against local authorities,
we have always got to act with the grain of what they are trying
to do as well. What we have tried to do is work within the framework
of Local Strategic Partnerships, for example, to make sure that
we are doing the kinds of things that the Strategic Partnership
is looking for, and contacting local groups. Yes, of course, there
is always going to be a level at which you are contacting people
who want to do something on the ground which is not approved by
someone, but also contacting local groups to make sure that what
we are doing is known about by the local authorities in whose
authorities we are trying to spend. We are trying to play it both
ways, in one sense.
Mr McGann: I think my relatively
limited experience is that where local authorities have taken
the Lottery very seriously and put a lot of effort into galvanising
activity locally then those areas have done well. Without naming
names, my impression is that in some of the areas, including coalfield
areas—
Q111 Christine Russell: It
does not depend on the size or the capacity or the authority,
it is just whether or not they are prepared actually to do it?
Mr McGann: I think it is about
lateral thinking. You could say either the Lottery is not for
local authorities, or you can say, "Boy, is this an opportunity"
and seize it, and those who have have done rather well out of
it. I feel that, where local authorities which have not taken
the Lottery seriously, their local communities have suffered as
a result.
Mr Oppenheim: I think, from our
experience, it depends very much how engaged already a local authority
is with its voluntary sector, and many local authorities have
a long and very, very good tradition of supporting local community
organisations, local charities, with grants of their own or through
contract arrangements. In parts of the country where that is not
such a well-developed relationship then it is much more difficult
to find community-based organisations to fund. Certainly that
has been some of our experience, though I would not want to overstate
it, in coalfield areas. In our early attempts to target some of
our money we found that where actually we put in a lot of time
and effort, not only to working with community organisations but
to working with elected members and their officers in local authorities,
that really pays dividends but sometimes can be a very lengthy
piece of work, but ultimately worthwhile.
Q112 Christine Russell: Is
what you are saying really that you find it difficult because
the kind of voluntary sector infrastructure is not there in many
of the coalfield communities?
Mr Oppenheim: Absolutely, yes,
and it takes time to build that up.
Q113 Christine Russell: Do
you feel that your funds are necessary because local authorities
just do not have the funds? Do you feel that you are funding projects,
programmes, whatever, which perhaps in other parts of the country
are funded by local authorities, but they simply do not have sufficient
resources in the coalfield communities?
Mr Oppenheim: I do not think so
necessarily. We are always very careful, I think, to make sure
that we do not fund where a local authority or another statutory
body, for that matter, ought to be funding, in terms of there
being a duty to fund. We would not want to see Lottery money substituting
in that way. These days sometimes it is very hard to draw a line.
I think you have to take what you find. We try to respond to the
aspirations that local organisations put to us. Again, I go back
to my earlier point, that where we have put the effort in to doing
some development work, to working with a local authority, you
can begin to get over some of those problems, recognising, of
course, that local authorities are constrained for financial resources
as well.
Q114 Mr Cummings: These questions
are directed at the Coalfields Regeneration Trust. The first question
is, quite simply, what is the expected life of the Trust?
Ms Bibby: We would like to see
the Government having a medium-term investment of ten years in
coalfield communities.
Q115 Mr Cummings: The expected
life of the Trust, is it not three years?
Ms Bibby: At the moment, the Trust
will cease in March 2005.
Q116 Mr Cummings: Does this
not cause you deep-rooted problems, inasmuch as you can plan for
only perhaps a three-year funding round?
Ms Bibby: Absolutely.
Q117 Mr Cummings: If this
is the case, how does that link into Urban II and European funds,
and how do you co-ordinate and link them together in any particular
projects?
Ms Bibby: With great difficulty,
obviously. In terms of our grant funding, we have to spend most
of it within the first 18 months of a three-year funding tranche,
in order to get it spent and monitored in time, to act as though
we will cease to operate at the end of that period. It makes it
very difficult to use, in terms of match-funding because if there
are delays in other funding programmes we are unable to match
them. Our role which is emerging, which is a more strategic and
influencing role, is very difficult to plan when we can only ever
commit for a three-year period. For example, our new project with
English Partnerships, where we have developed a roving team to
make sure that local people benefit from the development of ex-colliery
sites. It is very difficult when by the time you have got people
in post that will be less than the three-year project.
Q118 Mr Cummings: It is easy
to see the problems that you have identified, but do you think
there will ever be a time when the coalfields are fully regenerated
and the Trust will no longer be required?
Ms Bibby: I think there will be
a time when the Trust will no longer be required. I would not
like to put a timescale on that, but I think we do need some long-termism
really to plan and give communities some confidence so that we
can attack things. I think we would be really happy to have performance
indicators and milestones attached to that, but we do feel that
we are trying to instil some sustainability when we have no longevity
ourselves.
Q119 Andrew Bennett: Should
you not have a target for when you should put yourselves out of
business? There are one or two colliery disaster funds which are
still making payments about 100 years after the colliery disaster
happened. Surely you should look at that as a horrible warning
and think, "Well, in another six years, or another nine years,
we should be planning to finish"?
Ms Bibby: I agree with you totally.
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