Examination of Witnesses (Quesitons 20-39)
DEPARTMENT FOR
CULTURE, MEDIA
AND SPORT,
SPORT ENGLAND,
ENGLISH HERITAGE,
ARTS COUNCIL
AND BIG
LOTTERY FUND
MONDAY 2 JUNE
2008
Q20 Chairman: What value are you
actually adding to the £10,000 you make on each grant? What
value is your organisation actually adding?
Dr Thurley: Our grant programme
is a very high risk programme because we are giving quite large
sums of money to very poor congregation groups who own buildings
that are often up to 700 years old, very often the incumbent would
never have been involved in a building project before, his PCC
and his church wardens equally may have absolutely no experience
of building whatsoever, and yet we are proposing to give them
maybe £200,000 worth of public money. What our grant programme
is intended to do is help guide these people and support them,
and often support their architects as well because very often
their architects do not have the necessary expertise and knowledge
to deal with the repair costs. The added benefit that we bring
is the ability to bring the project in on time, on budget and
actually achieve its aims.
Chairman: Thank you.
Q21 Mr Touhig: Mr Holgate, if there
is one message that comes through from the C&AG's Report it
is that applying for grants in the DCMS sector is too complex,
too difficult. Would you agree with that?
Mr Holgate: I do not think I would
agree, I am afraid. That is not to say for one moment that we
cannot improve, and colleagues have already given examples in
response to the Chairman's questions about online application.
I am sure we can improve year-on-year.
Q22 Mr Touhig: So you do not agree
with that conclusion?
Mr Holgate: I do not think I do
agree, no. The satisfaction rating for the—
Q23 Mr Touhig: Well, let us look
at the satisfaction rating on page 30, paragraph 3.9. It says
it is rather poor and those applying only rate you six out of
10. That is not very good, is it?
Mr Holgate: Well, I do not think
you can tell whether six out of 10 is very good or not very good
because it is not normalised against some other measure of quality.
Q24 Mr Touhig: It is clearly an indication
of the dissatisfaction of people having to go through the process
of applying for grants.
Mr Holgate: Well, I am looking
at figure 17 and I see a marked disparity. I see it is perfectly
reasonable between the people who were successful in their grant
applications and those who were not.
Q25 Mr Touhig: So you are fairly
complacent about it then?
Mr Holgate: No, I would not claim
complacency at all. As I said, I am sure we can do better and
these bodies all have plans—
Q26 Mr Touhig: What do you specifically
have in mind to make it better?
Mr Holgate: The online applications
could be one improvement if we could get it to work.
Q27 Mr Touhig: If you could get it
work, yes, but you do not have any other improvements in mind
at the moment?
Mr Holgate: Well, it depends on
the policy objectives. As Peter said, it depends a bit on the
policy objectives of the scheme as to whether you think it has
succeeded or not. I suspect Alan's example is an example of a
successful grant if the book he was referring to went on to win
prizes or enabled him to make a living as an author.
Q28 Mr Touhig: I am sure we will
come back to that in due course. Mr Wanless, it is pretty clear
that your organisation's applications process is complicated too,
62% of applications you receive you have to send back because
they are incomplete.
Mr Wanless: Yes. This is the Awards
for All programme again which, as I said, earlier, if you look
at the application form is not at all difficult. There are pieces
of information that you need to complete, like bank statement
details and a reference and so on. We have found that many applications
that are received for this scheme, often from people who are applying
for Lottery money for the first time, do not attach key pieces
of information.
Q29 Mr Touhig: Except that six out
of 10 you have to send back.
Mr Wanless: Yes.
Q30 Mr Touhig: Are you suggesting
people who complete these application forms should have a business
administration degree in order to get it right?
Mr Wanless: Absolutely not. I
would say if you look at the application form it is pretty straightforward.
We have tried to improve the guidance notes since this Report
was produced to make it even clearer. It actually says, "How
to apply. Paragraph 1: Read the guidance notes. Over three-quarters
of the applications we receive are sent back or rejected altogether
because they contained basic errors, were missing information
or asked for a grant for something that Awards for All does not
fund". For example, we would not fund profit-making organisations
of one kind or another. Through improving our guidance and simplifying
processes we have reduced this figure, but it is still unacceptably
high.
Q31 Mr Touhig: It is high, it is
six out of 10.
Mr Wanless: It is now down to
more like five out of 10, but I would agree with you that is not
good enough.
Q32 Mr Touhig: The Chairman referred
to figure 15 on page 29.
Mr Wanless: Yes.
Q33 Mr Touhig: Why on earth did it
take the time equivalent of 613 full-time employees to prepare
an application for the Lottery Fund Reaching Communities programme
in 2006-07?
Mr Wanless: This is a scheme which
is enabling people to access larger sums of money than the Awards
for All, so there are a set of planning procedures and checks
to ensure—
Q34 Mr Touhig: You are supposed to
be helping people, not burying them under paperwork, are you not?
Mr Wanless: Absolutely, and I
would say that our processes are designed to encourage and help
people through that process to make the best case they can for
Lottery money.
Q35 Mr Touhig: The Report says that
613 full-time employees would be required to complete the applications
in 2006-07 for your Reaching Communities programme.
Mr Holgate: Could I make a point
at this stage? I think I am right in saying the mean award is
£221,000 from this scheme, so at 21 days' average application
time, plus two days for evaluation, the person is in a sense "earning"
£9,600 per day that he or she is compiling their application,
which I think is quite a high rate of return for filling out the
form correctly and meeting the objectives of the scheme.
Q36 Mr Touhig: A large number of
people have been suggested by the NAO Report, 613 people would
be required.
Mr Holgate: There are two things
there. There are unsuccessful applications and there are successful
applications. I am saying if you succeed an average award under
this scheme is £221,000—
Q37 Mr Touhig: If you succeed.
Mr Holgate: If you succeed, yes,
and it is 23 days in total both applying and evaluating to achieve
that, and that is quite a high rate of return.
Q38 Mr Touhig: As the Chairman pointed
out earlier, your costs seem to vary and you do not seem to be
learning lessons one from the other. Is it not true with all your
staff that the application process is so complex, so long, you
are sending some of them back because they are incomplete, that
your staff are not coping with these applications in an efficient
way. You are making it too complex for people to access the money.
Mr Wanless: On the incomplete
applications, we have evidence now from the People's Millions
programme, for example, which was an online applications programme,
that that almost obliterated incomplete applications because you
could only move to the next stage by attaching the right information.
That was a hugely beneficial change.
Q39 Mr Touhig: How far have you got
with the online? It seems from what Mr Holgate said that it is
at an early stage, you do not even know if it works yet.
Mr Wanless: We do not. We would
hope to have that coming on-stream in 2010 across all our programmes.
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