TUESDAY 27 JANUARY 2004

BARONESS PITKEATHLEY OBE, LADY BRITTAN CBE, MR STEPHEN DUNMORE AND MR MIKE WILKINS

  Q200  Chris Bryant: You could allocate lots of money to London, for instance, and every single penny be spent in Covent Garden or Mayfair, and that would not end up seeming like a very sane and sensible outcome.

  Lady Brittan: The Community Fund has a London committee. They have a number of priorities which they publish and they fund within those priorities. They have one or two geographical areas particularly that they want to get money into. So it is certainly not the way you say. Each of our regions allocates money according to the priorities of the region.

  Mr Dunmore: You are quite right, that in terms of Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales there is a pre-determined allocation based again on population weighted by deprivation. As we have said, the Community Fund then goes through the same process for the English regions. The New Opportunities Fund has not done that for the English regions and that is partly, again, a consequence of the sorts of programmes we have been asked to run by the Government, which have been national programmes. We have targeted those in different ways, depending on the particular programme. Just to give you an example, when we were funding out of school hours learning projects, we very much wanted to target on disadvantage, but the best way of doing that, after a lot of discussion and consultation, seemed to be by targeting the money, at least to an extent, on those schools with the highest incidence of free school meals—which was a way of tackling disadvantage. Another example would be the PE & Sport programme, where we have made allocations to every LEA area but they have been weighted by deprivation in those LEAs. I think, as a general rule, for most of our programmes we will target them on disadvantage in some way. Very often for our programmes we will use the index of multiple deprivation in order to do the targeting, very much recognising—and I think this is going to be an important issue for the new distributor—that that does not always work terribly well in a rural context and you have to be a bit more sophisticated in your targeting of rural areas. There are other ways of doing it as well. If you are trying to fund particular communities of interest (for example, those who are disabled) then you will target in a different way again. I think you need to be flexible about this.

  Q201  Chris Bryant: New opportunities. I guess one possible new opportunity would be for kids from a poorer background, an area with multiple indices of deprivation, to go to live theatre, opera maybe, contemporary dance, whatever. For instance, in South Wales the new Millennium Centre is being built with a large amount of lottery money going into it from the arts end, as it were, but, since there are not going to be any trains that go anywhere from Cardiff after 10 o'clock at night, it is going to be more of a matinee centre than Millennium Centre! Do you get engaged in the business of making sure that people who are from isolated communities have access to the arts? Or is that the arts end? Is that for them? Because you have just talked about access to sport.

  Mr Dunmore: I guess this would not be particularly around arts, but certainly when we are funding projects—and, again, depending on the programme—we may well take into account the need to fund access issues. I guess an example of that would be healthy living centres, again in rural areas, where we have certainly funded mobile provision of health advice and information, and we have certainly funded transport costs as well for people to get to a place where they can actually receive that sort of advice and support. In our out-of-school-hours learning programme, we funded transport costs around the issue of special schools and children who very much do need some sort of transport facility to take advantage of the after-school activities. Very often the LEA transport will come at a certain time, at the end of the school day to take them home, and if they then stay on for after-school activities you have to provide transport. So, yes, we are very conscious of those sorts of issues.

  Baroness Pitkeathley: Some of those arts access issues have been tackled through some of our summer activities programmes for young people who are at particular risk also.

  Mr Wilkins: Perhaps I might also say that this is exactly the stuff of Awards for All. These are small awards, up to £5,000, for essentially community-based organisations—although we also have the ability to fund health bodies, parish and town councils. The sort of projects you were talking about, the issues to do with access, are exactly the sort of things we fund at the bottom end of the spectrum of lottery funding. We can respond to the particular needs of very small groups who want to have access and who make application to us to have access to the sorts of activities that you suggest. A whole range of the awards that are made through the Awards for All programme on behalf of all the distributors goes into exactly building up that sort of network of lottery-funded, small organisational activities which focus on disadvantage, and the distribution of the Awards for All monies is very similar to the way which Stephen has described for the Community Fund. Although we do not get the same national publicity as the Community Fund or the New Opportunities Fund, we have an absolutely fantastic local press response to the sort of awards we make about just the sort of activities you are describing.

  Q202  Chris Bryant: How much does it cost to process an application on average?

  Baroness Pitkeathley: It depends entirely on the nature of the programme. Some of the ways in which the New Opportunities Fund has allocated money is a very cost effective way of doing it, others through award partners, but, where you do individual assessments for open access programmes, naturally that is very expensive, particularly where you have to provide some of the one-to-one support that some people need.

  Mr Dunmore: Could we offer to give you some figures at a later date?

  Mr Wilkins: For the Awards for All programme I can tell you it is £176 per application processed.

  Chairman: Thank you very much indeed for a most useful session.