Examination of Witnesses (Questions 39-55)
LAURA DYER,
ANNE RIPPON
AND SEAN
TIZZARD
JANET BIRKIN
AND RICHARD
CROMPTON
30 NOVEMBER 2009
Q39 Chairman: Having got the
police off the scene, let us now turn to lottery funding in the
East Midlands. We have Anne Rippon from Sport England, Sean Tizzard
from the Big Lottery and Laura Dyer from the Arts Council. All
of them have, among other things, an East Midlands regional remit.
When the lottery came out in the early years,
there was a strong view in the East Midlands that, to put it crudely,
we were not getting our fair share of the action. Was that true
then?
Laura Dyer: From an arts point
of view, that was true in the early days. What we have striven
to do over the past 10 years is to work really hard. It was actually
slightly about raising ambition and aspiration for some of the
big projects, particularly for the large capital awards. We were
slow off the blocks in terms of starting and getting in those
large-scale applications. Obviously, over the past 10 years that
has transformed. Last week, with the opening of Nottingham Contemporary,
we completed a programme that invested upwards of £140 million
into the region, into nine new or greatly improved buildings,
in both cities and rural areas.
Q40 Chairman: Would that be
the same for Sport England?
Anne Rippon: Yes, that was certainly
one of the concerns that we had in the early days. We were getting
quite a lot of small projects through, so the actual numbers,
in cash terms, were quite low compared with other regions, but
we had lots of projects coming through, so there were lots of
projects, but smaller projects. What we have tried to do over
the years is work together to look at areas of need and address
some of the issues that are behind that.
Sean Tizzard: From the Big Lottery
Fund's perspective, based on statistics of population deprivation,
we would look for the East Midlands to get about 7.9% of the national
pot. We are currently at about 7.6%, so we are a little bit down,
but just about on track. Recently, we have had some big successes.
The "myplace" programme, which has a non-lottery funded
programme working with the Department for Children, Schools and
Families, got £27.5 million into the region, including £5
million in Sir Peter's constituency, which is 11% of the total
pot.
Village SOS, which is a programme that we run
in conjunction with the BBC, looks at enterprise within villages.
We have recently gone through the process of shortlisting those
projects. Of the 17 in England, five are in the East Midlands,
so there is a definite positive wave in the East Midlands.
Q41 Chairman: Shout me down
if I have got this wrong, but has it been about the slowness of
getting the big capital schemes off the ground? Has that been
the essential problem in the East Midlands?
Anne Rippon: Yes, one of the issues
for the East Midlands is having Nottingham, Derby and Leicester
rather than having, say, a Birmingham as they have in the West
Midlands. We do not have the large city authority to take forward
the really big projects.
Q42 Chairman: Be careful what
you say. I can see a hole opening up here. So, there is no big
major international conurbation.
Laura, how did you get the new contemporary
gallery off the ground in Nottingham? I think I'm right in saying
that David Hockney is there today and, unfortunately, I am here.
Laura Dyer: The same with me,
missing lunch with David Hockney. Obviously, though, I'm delighted
to be here.
The developments in Leicester, Derby and Nottingham
worked closely with the local authorities, because in each case
they were the driver for Capital Build. So they worked very closely
with officers and members about what their needs were. As Anne
says, although we do not have a large metropolitan centre, speaking
from the arts point of view, if you put together the cultural
assets of the three cities, they outstrip Birmingham, Manchester
or Liverpool in terms of what they have to offer, and, most importantly,
the audiences that they draw. So people do engage very highly
with those facilities.
Elsewhere we obviously have some great arts
organisations with huge ambitions. First Movement in Derbyshire
is leading with a project that is revolutionary in working with
people with profound learning disabilities and physical disabilities.
In Northampton, the theatre down there was led by the arts organisation;
and also there is the New Art Exchange in Nottingham. So we have
great examples, where a combination of individual vision and the
organisations that have driven it are coupled with really strong
support from local government.
Q43 Chairman: Tell me, because
you all accepted in the early years that there was not a fair
share of resources, did you as distributors take a conscious decision
that this was not right and that you would put in place remedial
measures, as it were, to sort it out?
Anne Rippon: Yes. We certainly
had the lottery distributors forum working across the East Midlands,
which brought us all together to look at where there were issues.
Sometimes they were common issues and sometimes they were different,
but where there were common issues we worked together with bodies
such as funders forums and local authorities to identify where
the projects might come from and what issues were holding them
up.
Laura Dyer: I would add in terms
of our own investment that the lottery is about 17% of our spend
as an organisation. The vast majority is obviously grant-in-aid
from the Treasury. We have looked strongly at where we spend our
resources in terms of our infrastructure, and then looked at what
we call our cold spots. In our case, they are particularly Northamptonshire
and Lincolnshire.
We have tried to take some corrective action
by working directly, particularly with the Lincolnshire coast
and Northamptonshire, to try to generate more applications. Although
it is an open application process, and of course one needs strong
applications, there are ways in which we can use our resources
and staff time to help stimulate the expertise and demand in those
areas.
Anne Rippon: Similarly, we have
identified areas where not so much is happening, but we can say
that 13.6% of the sporting and lottery funding that we distribute
has come to the East Midlands. That is based on the 7.7 mark that
we were talking about before. That is quite a good achievement
for the East Midlands.
Q44 Chairman: Sean, tell us,
you mentioned a figure of 7.6 and a target of 7.9. There is still
a bit to go.
Sean Tizzard: The target that
we set for East Midlands funding is 7.9, of which we are at 7.6.
That is based on the population of the East Midlands and levels
of deprivation.
Q45 Chairman: When will you
reach that target?
Sean Tizzard: Hopefully soon,
with the successes of myplace and village SOS.
Q46 Judy Mallaber: What other
courses do we have? It is a rather disparate region. On points
1 and 2, as you said, Laura, the trouble is that we are dependent
upon applications. The difficulty is that it is quite hard to
spread the benefits fairly to places that may not have people
bright and skilled enough to even think of putting in an application,
or who might have a bright idea but no one to follow it through.
The third point was about the twists and turmoils that you have
to go through to get applications through for all but the very
small grants.
Laura Dyer: We work closely with
local government, and one of the challenges—I do not want
to pre-empt questions on what is around the corner—is that
we can definitely see that where there are capable and active
cultural teams in the local authority that we can work with, we
get a strong response. For example, if there is not an arts development
officer for us to work with directly on the ground, it is often
harder to give that support to people as they emerge. We certainly
do that. We also send more and more of a challenge to our artists
and arts organisations that we fund through other routes to act
as a kind of host and a sort of talent development agency. So
there are lots of ways in which different arts organisations are
working with artists who may be finding it harder to make those
applications to again generate that kind of interest.
Q47 Judy Mallaber: Can you
explain what mechanisms you use? I am in the unfortunate position
of being in an authority area that has just got rid of its arts
development officers and most of its sports development officers.
How would any developments be stimulated in a situation like that?
I am sure there are large parts of the East Midlands where the
local authorities have never particularly engaged in that kind
of initiative.
Anne Rippon: In terms of the issues
you have talked about, we appreciate the fact that you have been
quite vocal about making sure that we keep sports development
officers where we can. In each county, we have established county
sports partnerships, which bring together the local authorities
and their sports teams, sports clubs and anybody else who is interested
in sport in that area to try to get a joint approach. Those county
sports partnerships have been doing a good job in getting information
about grants and in supporting people who want to make bids for
grants to let them know what is around and how our small grants,
which are very important for small clubs, work. The information
we have so far is that, in our new small grants programme, we
are getting a good proportionate share of the small grants that
are available for small clubs. Derbyshire has done particularly
well thanks to the work of the county sports partnership.
Sean Tizzard: Our approach to
helping groups is slightly different. We do work with local authorities,
but the key groups that we work with are councils for voluntary
services and voluntary action groups to ensure that the groups
are skilled up to a level to be able to apply successfully. Within
our BASIS programme, we have funded 35 projects around the region
to the sum of £9.5 million. That is funding of voluntary
action groups and CVSs to ensure that those groups can be skilled
up to apply.
To touch on something that was mentioned earlier,
where there are pockets where there isn't perhaps the skill, we
have been working over the past year on a number of outreach areas,
looking in particular at our Awards for All programme and Reaching
Communities to understand where, across the region, groups are
not perhaps getting their fair share. We then work again with
the voluntary action groups and CVSs in those areas to try to
upskill them. That is something that we have been doing as a regional
team. The Public Accounts Committee commended our outreach work
on that front.
Laura Dyer: Similarly to Sport
England, we have arts partnerships at a county level and a county
arts officer. There is still an arts officer at every county level
doing the work of looking at where there is no provision and then
working with arts organisations. Artery, for example, has done
a lot of good work with emerging organisations and artists to
give them some sort of support and advice. We ourselves do roadshows,
so we travel every year and do a series of roadshows in different
locations. We spread those out. We also do very specific targeted
workshops for artists, taking them through the whole application
process and getting them to do a dummy assessment themselves,
so that they really understand how the assessment process works.
We have also helped establish a series of forums,
so there are organisations such as East Midlands Participatory
Arts Forum, which is about organisations that work at a community
level having the opportunity to share good practice and experiences.
There is also the work we do with organisations such as Voluntary
Arts Network, again reaching those voluntary, third-sector community
arts and amateur arts organisations that we might not have direct
contact with, but that they have networks into.
Q48 Judy Mallaber: On the
large projects, has it been possible to do anything to smooth
out the difficulties that applicants face when they have to get
match funding and go around one organisation after another with
everyone saying, "We won't fund you until they do"?
That is a perpetual problem. Has there been any work done to try
to ease that path? That applies more to the Big Lottery Fund than
some of the others.
Sean Tizzard: On the Big Lottery
Fund's application, groups do not need to have match funding.
We would say that, with our Reaching Communities programme, groups
could apply for 100% of what they need.
Q49 Judy Mallaber: The problem
is that every organisation that would be part of the funding won't
say yes until all the others have, which can sometimes send you
round in circles.
Laura Dyer: We do, actually. As
the Arts Council we are often the first funder, so we step in
often in the first instance and give that surety for others, particularly
when we are working with European funding and particularly with
local government funding. For example, in Leicester we put our
£10 million on the table for Curve straight away.
Anne Rippon: One of our important
roles is the brokering of those deals for people. If somebody
comes with the germ of an idea, we may not be able to put money
directly on the table immediately, but clearly we will work with
them to help them find other funders that might be interested.
There has been some good collaboration, looking at different aspects
of funding. For example, with the development agency we have found
that money that has come from regeneration has matched up with
Sport England money, and other money, to make projects happen.
Q50 Sir Peter Soulsby: It
strikes me that your three organisations have rather different
roles and relationships with the people who are on the receiving
end of your grants. It is not just what you are about, in each
case. I wonder if each of you in turn could give some flavour
of the balance between what you have at the regional level and
what you have at the national level, and to what extent you see
yourselves as the distributors of grants as opposed to, perhaps,
the promoters of particularly desirable ends, or the advocates
on behalf of the region to the national level of the organisation.
Laura Dyer: We operate an incredibly
devolved situation in the Arts Council, so our authority lies
at a regional level. We have a regional arts council with 15 members,
one of whom is a Department for Culture, Media and Sport appointment
because they also sit on our national council, and we have six
local authority representatives who have to be an elected member.
They make all decisions on grants to do with our Treasury grant-in-aid—up
to £800,000—and make recommendations to the national
council on grants over £800,000. So decision making is at
a devolved level. Similarly with grants for the arts, we operate
a very tight turnaround time of five or 12 weeks, depending on
the level, and all those grant decisions are made at a local level
and then scrutinised by our regional council.
We feel that we have strongly stuck to the desire
that decisions are best made at a local level, closest to the
point of experience. Those 15 people, who are all volunteers except
for our chair who gets a small remuneration, bring an enormous
amount of wisdom and knowledge to the table, coupled, obviously,
with officer expertise. The national level gives us a real sense
of national pulling-together—an overview and expertise that
we can draw on, that we couldn't possibly provide at a regional
level in every single region.
At the moment we are going through a process
of cost saving, and we will be getting our administration costs
down to a level of 6% moving forward. Our lottery resource is
critical to us. It came about fairly early in my career in the
arts, and it has transformed the arts landscape and what we have
been able to do. But it is a small part in terms of our financial
model and, critically, what we would say is that we are a development
agency for the arts and, of course, as any good development agency,
we have resources that we are able to apply to meet those aims.
But we see our role very much as brokering, influencing and being
able to demonstrate how the arts truly can transform people's
lives.
Sean Tizzard: We have two operation
centres in the Big Lottery Fund that assess all the applications—one
in Birmingham and one in Newcastle. It is very much part of the
role of the regional team to supply regional context for all the
assessments that we have. We have a regional committee member,
so when decisions are made committee members take on board not
only the assessment from the operational teams, but also the comments
that we have put into the mix.
We are in the process of developing a set of
new programmes, one of which will revolve around a community funding
theme. That is being worked out for launch in 2010 and is going
to work very closely with local wards and local communities.
Finally, on the point about how we can influence
nationally, an example is that in the East Midlands a voice that
was coming out very strongly was about the area of continuation
funding. So if a grant is coming to an end, what do we do then?
We held a conference at The Peepul's Centre a couple of weeks
ago, where that message came out again. So we are influencing
centrally and I know that there is going to be some movement around
continuation funding as a result of the voices from the East Midlands.
Anne Rippon: We are obviously
a national organisation and with our new strategy we are charged
with getting 1 million people doing more sport by 2012-13. Our
focus is on delivering those specific outcomes and, as such, a
significant amount of our funding—£480 million of lottery
funding over the four-year period—will go through the national
governing bodies of sport.
In addition to that, we have some other funding
that the region will directly benefit from. We are funding the
county sports partnerships at £200,000 a year. There is £13
million of Exchequer funding going into school sport. Our sustainable
facilities fund is £10 million, with £6 million of lottery
money and £4 million of Exchequer money, and it is going
to capital projects. Those are all dealt with on a national basis,
but of course our role in the region is to make sure that we are
the eyes and ears and that we are helping to ensure that people
know about the schemes and opportunities that are available, and
also that we are helping them to make good and appropriate bids.
We don't want people putting in bids that are not going to get
there; we want to make sure that they are really good bids, which
are going to help us achieve our overall objective of getting
1 million people involved in sport.
We also recognise that at local level there
are sometimes some issues in some areas, so we have a themed rounds
programme. There is a competitive round across the country, but
the recent round was for rural communities and clearly that has
an impact for the East Midlands. So we were able to ensure that
people in the East Midlands were aware of the opportunities for
the rural-themed rounds and that they got their bids in, and I
am pleased to say that clearly we are doing well on that at the
moment and already we have a good proportion of schemes through
to the second round.
Then there is the small grants programme too.
The first quarter's figures show that 47 of the 100-plus projects
have gone through from the East Midlands. So we are doing really
quite well in getting those projects through, even though there
is not a regional decision-making element in the grant aid process.
It is a national decision-making process, but it depends very
much on us getting good schemes through from the East Midlands
to ensure that happens.
Q51 Sir Peter Soulsby: Do
each of you have in place a mechanism for assessing the impact
of the spending?
Laura Dyer: Yes—in various
ways. In terms of our capital investment, at the moment we are
conducting a longitudinal study with East Midlands Development
Agency, which looks at the social and economic impact of that
investment. We are doing that over a long period of time. So there
are very specific pieces of research that we do.
In terms of the regularly funded organisations,
which are organisations that receive grants for up to three years,
there is quite a rigorous monitoring process in train for them.
For example, they have to complete quite detailed assessments,
which give us statistics and other material that we can feed through
to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to show the efficacy
of those organisations. In terms of grants for the arts, we conduct
assessments of those grants in terms of the brokerage, the people
reached and how our money is reaching different communities. So
the different grants all have different reporting requirements.
Sean Tizzard: The Big Lottery
Fund classes itself as an outcomes funder. In the assessments,
we are looking at the difference that a project will make to the
beneficiaries. Grants officers will monitor activity both during
the project and at the end of the project. For capital projects,
there is an ongoing period of post-grant monitoring too. So, yes,
monitoring goes on.
Anne Rippon: We monitor every
award with clear key performance indicators and regular monitoring
evaluation on a quarterly basis. Every award has its own specific
contract, so we sometimes write in conditions in relation to things
that we particularly want to see happen. The Active People Survey
conducted by Sport England every two years is also showing the
levels of participation within each area so we are actually using
it as one of our outcomes, particularly when the national governing
body of sport is involved. We want to see it getting more people
taking part in sport and we need evidence, and the Active People
Survey is helping to provide it for us.
Q52 Sir Peter Soulsby: At
the moment, a lot of funding is being distorted by one big thing—the
Olympics. What is your assessment of the impact on your spending
in the East Midlands? Will we be getting our share? Will we be
getting part of the legacy?
Laura Dyer: The Arts Council sees
the cultural Olympiad, in particular, as a real opportunity. In
the region, post the closure of the regional cultural consortiums,
we are taking the lead on the cultural Olympiad on behalf of all
the cultural agencies, so we are hosting the post at our office.
We are looking at a range of activities and managing a programme
of the legacy trust, which has some very exciting work. We are
leading on a number of key projects such as artists taking the
lead. It was recently announced and had the crocheted lions as
our project in the East Midlands. There are some great opportunities
for all communities in the East Midlands—artists and participants—to
take part.
Q53 Chairman: In terms of
total spend, Laura?
Laura Dyer: We are not seeing
a huge impact. Obviously, the lottery total receipt went down
slightly, but we have dealt with that. One of our challenges is
that we have now dipped slightly below the 50% success rate. We
are on about 46% success rate for applicants. That is a challenge.
We prefer to be above the 50% so that people have more than a
1:2 chance of putting in an application and being successful.
But that is outweighed by what we see as some of the benefits
such as the work of volunteering and people being passionate about
engaging and seeing how their work can have a really positive
effect in the East Midlands.
Sean Tizzard: We recognise that
the Olympics can have a fantastic benefit for all the communities
that we want to serve. At the Big Lottery Fund, we put £29
million into the legacy trust for the Olympics. As Laura mentioned,
we anticipate many benefits from ongoing volunteering as part
of the Olympics.
When I go to funding fairs, groups often say,
"Oh, the Big Lottery Fund. You haven't got any money, have
you?" We have therefore to work very hard internally to get
the message across that that is not the case. Actually, lottery
ticket sales are holding up and although there was a diversion
of money, it does not mean that we have no money at all.
Q54 Chairman: Is the amount
of money you have in the East Midlands going down?
Sean Tizzard: The initial budgets
up to 2012 are tapered going down. Lottery ticket sales are holding
up, so in the next release of our budgets in March 2010, a different
picture might be showing.
Anne Rippon: We, of course, are
very enthusiastic about the Olympics, as you might imagine—probably
more so than some of our colleagues. Clearly, there are lots of
advantages from the Olympics in the East Midlands. One of the
things that we have clearly seen is the impact of the pre-games
training camps work. Loughborough announced that the Japanese
team will be coming, and there are all sorts of spin-offs from
that, some of which stem back to the funding that we have put
into Loughborough in the past, but it has certainly meant that
it has a place on the world stage of sport. Recently, it recently
signed a deal with the Japanese Olympic Committee, which will
go on beyond the Olympics in London in 2012. It will also bring
in money to Loughborough university, which is a good thing, too.
There are other spin-offs. For example, the
local authorities have all got together and funded a post that
will be a young people co-ordinator to make sure that there is
real benefit for young people in the East Midlands. They are doing
a lot of work linked up with the Japanese team, and making sure
that there are links with local languages colleges and so on.
Having said that, the sports angle is very important for us. We
have just recently put £900,000 into Holme Pierrepont to
uprate the canoe slalom course, which will be used by the British
team in its preparations until the new slalom course comes on
nearer to London. There is a really good picture and quite an
exciting development move going forward.
Q55 Chairman: I have a last
question for you all—a quick answer if you could. If you
could do one thing to make things better for lottery funding and
recipients in the East Midlands, what would it be? This is a place
of wish and dreams.
Laura Dyer: For me, it would be
to give a higher profile to what it achieves. We have extraordinary
people in the region doing extraordinary things, with a whole
range of communities, and it is sometimes hard to get that on
the local media platforms.
Anne Rippon: When £1 billion
of lottery funding had come into the East Midlands last year,
we announced it and much press activity went on. A lot of people
did not realise that anything like that amount of money had come
into the East Midlands. It is quite an important thing for us
to hold on to really.
Chairman: Sean, you can phone a friend
if you want.
Sean Tizzard: No. I would echo
those two points. I shall pick on a point that was made earlier
about the complexity of application forms. From my perspective,
it is something that the Big Lottery Fund is looking at through
online applications. I would absolutely look to improve our customer
service option by making those application forms simpler. That
is a personal view. I know that it is something that is being
worked on centrally.
Chairman: Thank you all very much. That
was very helpful. Thank you for seeing us here rather than in
Loughborough. I am sorry if we have put you out a bit. I am sorry
that you did not get to meet David Hockney. I was devastated,
too.
Laura Dyer: I know. It would have
been a very big table.
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