UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 106

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

WELSH AFFAIRS COMMITTEE

WORK OF THE BIG LOTTERY FUND IN WALES

Tuesday 1 December 2009

MR HUW VAUGHAN THOMAS and MS CERI DOYLE

Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 32

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

Oral Evidence

Taken before the Welsh Affairs Committee

on Tuesday 1 December 2009

Members present

Dr Hywel Francis, in the Chair

Nia Griffith

Mrs Siān C James

Mr David Jones

Mr Martyn Jones

Alun Michael

Hywel Williams

________________

Memorandum submitted by the Big Lottery Fund

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Mr Huw Vaughan Thomas, Chair, Wales Committee, and Ms Ceri Doyle, Wales Director, Big Lottery Fund, gave evidence.

Q1 Chairman: Welcome to the Welsh Affairs Committee. For the record, could you introduce yourselves, please.

Mr Thomas: My name is Huw Vaughan Thomas. I am the Chair of the Big Lottery Fund in Wales, and I am accompanied on my right by Ceri Doyle, who is the Director in Wales of the Big Lottery Fund.

Q2 Chairman: I understand that you wish to make a very short statement to open this session.

Mr Thomas: Yes, if I may, just simply to, if you like, change slightly the context. When we last met and when the briefing paper was prepared, it was in the context of us launching a series of programmes in Wales based on our estimated amount of money that we would be receiving in terms of the Big Lottery's national distribution. Since then, we have been notified by DCMS that they have raised the estimate of the amount of money that would be available to the Big Lottery Fund primarily out of the fact that people are buying more Lottery tickets during the recession. It is also the case that it coincides with the fact that some of the large grants, particularly the large capital grants at UK level and indeed some of the other capital funds within Wales, the take-up of those grants has not gone according to the same timescale as we had originally anticipated again because of the recession. The upshot is that we anticipate that we will have at least as much money, and we will not be in a position of actually knowing exactly the amount of money until the end of the financial year, but at least as much money as was taken from us in terms of the Lottery diversion. As a result, we are intending to launch yet another strategic programme probably as regards young people and we will also be allocating more funds towards recession packages in Wales and, finally, we will be allocating more money towards our demand-led programmes in Wales, People and Places and the Awards for All, which would increase the success rate for those applying for those particular grants.

Q3 Chairman: Well, thank you very much for that and thank you for that silver lining, as I think you could describe it, and also for the memorandum and other papers you have provided. We note from your opening remarks and also from the background papers we have got that the Big Lottery Fund invests £1 million a week in Wales, which is quite a remarkable figure. How does that compare with other countries of the United Kingdom per head of population?

Mr Thomas: If you allow that we top slice 10% of our funds in the Big Lottery for UK-wide programmes and then we allocate to Wales, taking account of that 10% we spend in Wales 5.85% of the Lottery funds and 5.8 is Wales' share of the population and pretty close to Barnett as well. That is how we allocate. We think we have a proportional share as regards the Lottery funds.

Q4 Mrs James: I really do welcome that news, thank you. How many applications for grants do you receive per year, and how many are you able to fund?

Ms Doyle: It varies in terms of the programmes that we have live at any one period in time. If I can just explain briefly. Our demand-led programmes are continuously open. We receive applications on an ongoing basis and decisions are taken every two months on those applications. Because they are demand-led, the demand is set by the communities that are applying, so it literally can vary from a hundred to several hundred in any one year. At this point in time, through that demand-led programme, for every one project that is approved three are likely not to be funded due to the amount of funding we have available to distribute. On our strategic programmes it is significantly different. We term a "strategic programme" as investment that we wish to make in a very targeted area. For example, in the past we have invested in mental health, coronary heart disease, young people specifically, and because the parameters that we are prepared to fund are so narrow in those strategic programmes the likelihood of success is much higher. It can be as high in one in two applicants being approved.

Q5 Mrs James: Do you weight the applicants in any way? I am thinking off the top of my head, that I represent the constituency of Swansea East where there is a big-uptake of the Lottery, lots of people buy Lottery tickets, but in comparison to other areas very few organisations within my constituency make applications. Are you aware of not the hotspots for applications so much, but the cold spots?

Mr Thomas: We are very much aware of that. Obviously it will vary year-on-year, but we take a pattern over a long period. You will get a distortion. For example, so many organisations have their headquarters in Cardiff we code the application by where the headquarters are. If you ignore Cardiff, we are then able to look and see what the take-up is and we do take steps to make sure that organisations are aware of the Lottery and, in a sense, are guided in terms of their applications. It is not a question that each application has to be written in a very precise, professional manner, it is simply that people faced with needing to make an application sometimes give up and, therefore, they need help to push through. In the past we have had cold spots in Wrexham and the Caerphilly areas, but that has now been turned around. There are still cold spots we have to monitor and take action on.

Q6 Mr Martyn Jones: How many people in Wales were reached as a result of your "Big Thinking" consultation and have you changed anything in light of the responses?

Ms Doyle: In total we had 500 responses from organisations across Wales. Clearly a number of those organisations represent far more than 500 people. For example, the Welsh Council for Voluntary Action claims to represent the needs of - I cannot quite recall - in the region of 20,000 voluntary sector bodies. It was an extensive response and we were very pleased with the number of responses that we had both for attendance at the events and written responses. In terms of those policies that have changed, whilst the Wales Committee and the UK Board are still looking at implementing a number of the recommendations that came forward from the consultation, already in Wales we are implementing things like five-year funding, we are committed to full cost recovery and taking things forward. Picking up on your colleague's previous question, we were advised that people like to hear face-to-face, white of the eyes communications in terms of where our funding can be accessed and where it is prioritised. Keeping within our operating budget we are already conducting a serious of outreach events to target those cold spots we have referred to.

Mr Thomas: One of the surprising conclusions, at least from my point of view, was with our Awards for All, which is the small grants, and there is a success rate of around 65% on that. We tried to suggest that we fell in line with the rest of the UK where the top level is 10,000 and overwhelmingly we were told in consultation, "No, leave it alone. We prefer to stay with the 5,000". That explains why Wales is slightly out of kilter with the rest of the UK. We responded to what we heard.

Q7 Alun Michael: One of the criticisms that are mounted of the Big Lottery Fund, but in fairness it is mounted at all funders pretty well, is the tendency to have short-term funding. I think it would be fair to describe it as everybody from central Government to local government to the Big Lottery and individual trust funds would like to fund for two or three years in a discrete way where they can see what they are funding and for somebody else to deal with the long-term. In relation to the Big Lottery Fund, it has been described as a "dysfunctional boom/bust methodology". What plans do you have to ensure that you move from short-term funding towards more sustainable funding which provides long-term benefit, not a benefit that is there for a while and then taken away?

Mr Thomas: There is a difficult issue insofar as we are there as a funder but not a longer term funder. One of the things that we deliberately did, as Ceri has referred to, was move to a five-year funding cycle. We were in a three-year cycle, so people applied for three years and then came back again to us. With a five-year cycle we can look a bit more in terms of what they are intending to do for sustainability. I am not saying it is a complete answer because we will still have cases where people hope that by starting with us they will prove the need for a particular function and will be able to turn to others to help them in the longer term. Sadly, that does not always happen. We look at re-applications, but one thing we are very clear on is we are not particularly enamoured of re-funding exactly the same package because it simply moves the problem on to another point and you know it will come. If, on the other hand, an organisation says, "Look, we have done this amount of work over the first period. This bit looks as if it is going to develop and we have got this set of plans for it", that is the kind of thing we would like to talk to people about. We are very wary of simply paying out and hoping that somebody at the end of the day will come and rescue them, any organisation, and it is something we would certainly look at in much detail at the application stage.

Q8 Nia Griffith: One of the problems we seem to have is we are talking about trying to get more people to put in applications perhaps in areas that they would not have previously, so you say to people, "You cannot do this if you are a statutory body, you have to form your own little organisation" with so many of these charitable things that people can apply for. You then end up with people who are not very confident being encouraged and it is quite a struggle, but you help them, and then you get back to this business of sustainability because we are effectively putting Lottery money, which you can call public money, into assets or projects where there is not necessarily the capacity to manage and sustain for the future, at the same time as starving some areas where possibly there is an underlying asset which is owned by something like a county council, like playing fields, where there is a crying out need where a massive amount of activity could be provided if Lottery funding could be used for certain things, drainage or whatever. I find this is a difficult issue because we seem to be letting things go out into the care of some people who find it difficult to do and, at the same time, depriving where possibly we could put in things that could benefit with a partnership approach with statutory bodies. Have you looked at that at all?

Mr Thomas: Yes. Could I illustrate some of the issues around that. We fund as one of our strategic programmes staff for child's play. The intention behind that was first of all to improve the infrastructure in Wales able to support the development of child's play. Behind that we were expecting to have a set of applications that were around, as you say, playing fields or whatever. What we found in terms of the second round of applications was a lot of people putting in for child's play helpers, facilitators or whatever, people who would be there on the ground. That left us with a particular problem because clearly what we do not want to do is fund for a certain number of years a range of posts which, when our funding ends, would be left high and dry. What we did on that was to have a moratorium. We have talked to the Welsh Assembly Government and the Welsh Local Government Association in order to be clear what they will fund when our programme comes to an end. Only now are we restarting that. We had a similar experience with the Healthy Living Centres where in the previous incarnation the Big Lottery, as the New Opportunities Fund, was asked to develop this on the understanding that at the end of our development phase they would be picked up and funded through a variety of means, mainly statutory. In fact, that did not happen. Because we had set up so many, we had to work through programmes. We worked through supporting them to look for alternative sources of finance and perhaps further access to Lottery or other funders. Some had to close, but we maintained at least half those in Wales into a permanent state and our funding, in a sense, has now been withdrawn from there. There are difficulties but it can be done.

Ms Doyle: On the issue of sustainability, my Chairman has highlighted in effect there are four potential solutions: the project stops because it has achieved its outcomes and no longer requires funding; or stops because it cannot secure that funding; or it is funded by AN Other body, primarily in the public sector through local government and the health services or, indeed, the Welsh Assembly Government; or it is mainstreamed into a service contract where the project itself is competing to deliver a public service but often through the voluntary sector. Having invested in Wales for over ten years now, evidence is showing us that the best people to support voluntary sector organisations in being sustainable in the long-term is the voluntary sector itself. That is why we commissioned a project from the Welsh Council for Voluntary Action which has been running now for three years looking at those sustainability issues. In parallel with funding that sustainability project, we are working with bodies like the WLGA and Welsh Assembly Government to look at what is the role of the voluntary sector in delivering public services. I have to be frank with you, that is a very small percentage of the voluntary sector that is in a position to deliver public services. In the main it is a case of our funding or funding from another body that is prepared to put short-term funding in.

Q9 Nia Griffith: Is there not a case for more capital funding to help statutory bodies like local authorities provide good facilities because you do not have the sustainability issue at the end of that and yet there are areas which are crying out for it?

Mr Thomas: Clearly when it comes to statutory funders we have to be very careful as regards additionality rules so that we are not substituting for them. What we have found is if we work with the statutory sectors we are able to use Lottery funds in an exceptionally positive way, sometimes by being able to take the risks. If a statutory body, particularly if we take the Welsh Assembly Government, tries new approaches in mental health, for example, they will inevitably be criticised when things go wrong, even though part of innovation is trying things out and perhaps they will not work. With our strategic programme on mental health we are able to do that and then allow the statutory sector to see what is successful and pick it up from there. We are supplementing in terms of the capital funds that the Assembly Government is giving in terms of community facilities that are not needed by local authorities, but which can be made into a community benefit. We are supporting that in terms of the revenue side. It is the capital that comes from the Welsh Assembly Government. The combination of capital and revenue is important, as is the combination of the voluntary body, the statutory and the Lottery funds. They have to work in partnership to be a success.

Chairman: If we can move on to the impact of the Olympics and Paralympics on Lottery funding.

Q10 Alun Michael: There is one part which does relate to the Olympic funding but there is a statement that you make in your Strategic Framework, which is: "The Lottery is played across all walks of life, and we will ensure that our funding reflects the legitimate expectation that all communities should have the opportunity to benefit from our funding". I think I am right in saying that is not true, is it? It is true in the sense that it is played across all walks of life, but the ones who put into the Lottery are disproportionately people in poorer communities. It has been described as "buying the dream" for people who are poorer or more deprived or from those sorts of communities. This goes back to something Siān asked earlier. Are you trying to facilitate the applications from poorer communities in order to make sure that there is an adequate return to those communities that contribute most to the income?

Mr Thomas: Absolutely. There are two parts. The distribution of our funds in Wales is actually geared at the UK level reflecting, if you like, some of the disadvantage issues that arise in our communities in Wales. That is the first part, to make sure that we have funds here. The second is to make sure that the funds are distributed in as even a manner as we can. In a sense, we cannot always achieve that in every single programme, programme-by-programme, but we try and do it by the measures that I outlined to Mrs James in terms of the action that we take to ensure that communities apply for Lottery funds.

Q11 Alun Michael: Does that include, for instance, financing mentoring and seed money for preparation of programmes?

Mr Thomas: Yes.

Q12 Alun Michael: Is that something that you seek to promote in those communities that launch new bids?

Mr Thomas: Yes, we do. Part of the reason that we moved in our applications towards an expression of interest stage and then the more detailed application to the Fund was that it is often easier for people to put together their expression of interest and outline what it is they would like to do. If it looks like a good suggestion they have got then we will work with them in order to get them to complete the application. In the case of People and Places we have retained an organisation to do this on our behalf. Again, in the strategic programmes that we launch we have taken time to make sure we are able to identify the needs before we commission the applications to come in. On each programme we have tried to ensure that there is an even spread across the communities. We can only do it on a cumulative basis.

Q13 Alun Michael: That is helpful. On the Olympic and Paralympic Games, because there was £2.2 million of the Good Causes money that was directed in that direction, are you seeing that money to some extent benefiting Wales as well as other parts of the UK? Secondly, what changes have you had to make to funding schemes due to that transfer of money?

Mr Thomas: As far as the Big Lottery Fund in Wales, I recognise that as far as all of the Lottery distributors are concerned there was something like 64 or 65 million that went out. Our share was about 37 million of that that was diverted. The point at which that took place was the point at which we were planning to spend our funds for the period of 2009-15. We had to manage our budgets in a way which allowed us to launch particular strategic programmes during that period and yet reduce, I am afraid, the issue of the number of applications that have been coming through for demand-led funds. As I indicated right at the outset of this session, we now face a slightly different situation. We face at least as much of that money coming back into our coffers allowing us to continue very roughly the formula of about £1 million a week throughout the whole period of the Olympics take of the Lottery funds until 2012. We are now able to plan on a slightly different basis, and that is restoring some of those areas that we had reduced: demand-led programmes and commissioning yet another strategic programme and, as I indicated, it is likely to be one for young people. After the Olympics are over we expect to see some return. We are promised to have some return in terms of the capital that was spent by the Olympics on buildings and so on in East London coming back into the Lottery Fund for distribution. Yes, there was an impact but the way in which the funds have moved means the impact is going to be less than we had anticipated.

Q14 Mr Martyn Jones: I was going to ask you about how the recession has affected Lottery funding and you have already answered that. On top of that, of course, there is going to be a windfall of non-Lottery funding this year. To blow my own trumpet, since nobody else will, it was largely down to me over the last nine years pushing the Building Societies Association and Bankers Association and the Treasury to bring in an unclaimed assets legislation which is called the Dormant Bank Accounts and Building Society Accounts Act now. That is a voluntary scheme, unfortunately, but allegedly 98% of the banks are going to be signing up to that, so there should be in the region of £450 million, on the banks' estimates, coming in one year and then a trickle of funding after that as dormant bank accounts become eligible for distribution. You have the responsibility for distributing that throughout the UK. Are you monitoring when this money is going to come through and how you are going to use it? Will you be using it in the same way as the rest of the money? When is it likely to come and how much is it likely to happen bearing in minds the problems the banks have had over the last few years?

Ms Doyle: We welcome the dormant accounts funding and clearly, in response to some of your colleagues' questions, for every project we are funding there are at least two that we are not funding, so that money is well needed in Wales. We have been working with the Welsh Assembly Government over the last 18 months since the original announcements in relation to dormant accounts to look at where these funds can be best targeted. Whilst I cannot speak for the Welsh Assembly Government, the advice they are giving us is they would like the funding to be targeted at the young people.

Q15 Mr Martyn Jones: That was part of the legislation.

Ms Doyle: Particularly what we term the NEETS category - not in employment, education or training. Whilst we had originally estimated on a figure of in the region of £10 million coming into Wales from the dormant accounts funds, it is notoriously difficult for us to estimate and that figure comes with the greatest of health warnings because, as you have already stated, we do not know how many of the banks are going to commit to this, it will be a voluntary fund. At this point in time whilst we are monitoring the work with the Treasury and setting up the reclaim fund, so at least there is a mechanism for the banks to put the funds into, we do not estimate those funds being distributed in Wales until 2011 and those are the best estimates we are working on at the moment. Clearly if the funds are made available sooner then we are in a position in BIG in Wales to run with the programme on behalf of the Assembly sooner, and I think that parallels with the advice that you gave to the Heritage Minister at the Welsh Assembly Government two weeks ago.

Mr Thomas: Yes. It is also why, with that particular date receding a little bit from our first estimates, we feel the need to launch a strategic programme for young people.

Q16 Mr David Jones: Still dealing with the effects of the recession, you have told us in your memorandum that you are providing £500,000 to support projects that have been adversely affected by the downturn, and I think there have been some 90 applicants so far. Do you anticipate that this is going to be a short-term measure or will you see a need to continue this for some time yet?

Ms Doyle: We were overwhelmed. In total, we have made available in the region of £5 million additional in Wales to deal with the recession through a new initiative that we launched to provide advice services. We are also working very flexibly with our current applicants that are seeing the effect of the recession and, therefore, if they can demonstrate to us that they are unable to deliver their services directly because of some of the impacts of the recession we are providing a limited amount of additional funding. Because of the overwhelming demand that we received, later this month - 15 December - the Wales Committee, of which Huw is the Chair, will be considering a proposal to earmark at least an additional £2 million to support voluntary sector groups that are feeling the pinch due to the recession and the impact the recession is having on communities. We hope to be able to consider that in December and make an announcement in relation to it into the New Year.

Q17 Mr David Jones: So you do not regard it as a short-term measure and you think that you will need to continue support for some time yet?

Ms Doyle: At this point in time none of the evidence that we have seen implies that it is a short-term measure. The funding we will put in place will be for a two-year fixed period at this point in time. As with our outreach works in cold spots that we made reference to earlier, this is something we monitory literally on a weekly basis.

Q18 Chairman: Could I ask you about Welsh language publications. Have you done any assessment of the effectiveness of your Welsh language publications?

Mr Thomas: Obviously we adhere to the legislation and obligations on public bodies. We conduct an amount of our business through the medium of Welsh in those areas, particularly north and west. In those areas we do get applications through the medium of Welsh.

Q19 Chairman: What about those areas where there has been a great growth in the Welsh language, in southeast Wales for example, among young people, youth groups? I do not know, I am speculating. Have you tried to target them through the Welsh language?

Mr Thomas: All our publications in Wales are available through the medium of Welsh as well as English, and that applies in every single programme that we launch. Every launch event is run on a bilingual basis. The take-up and impact of our programmes in terms of Welsh language speakers is one of the things that we monitor. I am not aware that there is an issue arising out of that in the same way as there is a very clear issue about cold spots. Yes, we monitor it but it is not an issue that is giving us any cause for concern at this stage.

Q20 Chairman: Black minority ethnic groups, what about the language barriers there? Do you ensure that the mother tongue is used?

Ms Doyle: To finish off on the Welsh language issue, we are one of the exemplar bodies identified by the Welsh Language Board for the work that we do across the spectrum in dealing with the Welsh language. This year we received a grant from the Welsh Language Board to particularly focus on how we utilise new media through the Welsh Language Scheme. Obviously our website is available bilingually. When it comes to BME groups, it is an on-demand service. We will make all of our publications available in relevant community languages, but it is on a case of "requested by" as opposed to the way that we deal with the Welsh language where we compulsorily publish everything bilingually.

Q21 Mrs James: This is to build on my earlier question. You mentioned the cold spots and how you are working with then and you mentioned Caerphilly, et cetera, but what other less prosperous areas or more socially challenged areas do you think you could and should be working in?

Mr Thomas: If you will just bear with us, there are certain areas that we are, if you like, concerned about in terms of the take-up. This is over an historic period. I am reading from the notes in no particular order, but from the bottom up in a sense: Newport East, Islwyn, the Gower, Clwyd South and Alan and Deeside. They are the ones standing out for us at present as needing work done. The fact that we have this indicates we do regularly monitor these.

Q22 Mrs James: The challenge with the Gower is it is a different type of deprivation, is it not?

Mr Thomas: Yes.

Q23 Mrs James: My concern is that Swansea East regularly gets banded in with Swansea and a lot of the BIG funding covers the whole of the city. I am concerned about how smaller groups are picking up on this. How do you encourage them? How do you get down to that micro level?

Ms Doyle: Your point on the smaller groups is particularly pertinent and very relevant. Recently you may be aware of the number of media partners we have worked with. In Wales we are very proud of our People's Millions initiative. It is more than a showcase for us to work with ITV and for people to have an opportunity to vote on a regular basis. For the first year that we ran People's Millions, 80% of the applicants we received from Wales had never accessed Lottery funding previously. I feed that in as an example of how we are trying to work in different innovative ways with those community groups for whom the Lottery is as far away as Nepal, it is not accessible. People's Millions has been a lovely example of us bringing in contact with those community groups. Obviously on top of that we continue to do our outreach work and frequently do some of the constituency outreach work with Members of Parliament to promote the cold spots and to try and generate those applications. We intend to keep that going over the coming years.

Q24 Chairman: Are there examples of good practice where you have been very successful? Would it be the case that councils and voluntary services or the local authorities would be very proactive in ensuring that those socially challenged communities and groups have the information they require?

Mr Thomas: I have to say that we have a very good relationship with certain councils who have really worked quite hard to reverse a trend. It has needed the approach to chief executives and local councillors and Assembly Members and Members of Parliament to really make sure that the profile is raised. Neath Port Talbot stands out as a fairly good example of one where we had a problem going back about four years and it has turned round. I mentioned earlier both Caernarfon and to a lesser extent, but also true, in terms of Ynys Mōn where intervention has led to a growth of applications. We have to maintain this on a regular basis. The results of those interventions will mean it will be skewed again, but the fact we are able to point to this shows it is something we keep very much in our sights.

Chairman: I am very pleased you have mentioned Neath Port Talbot and I agree with you, for the record. I particularly commend the way you have worked with Neath Port Talbot Council's Voluntary Service and lots of groups on major initiatives, like Sustrans, where they have been able to get together in partnership and access significant funding.

Q25 Alun Michael: I wanted to come back to the list you gave in response to a question from my colleague, Mrs James. You said earlier on that one of the problems for you is in terms of perception, that you have so many voluntary organisations which have their headquarters in Cardiff. It is also the case that Cardiff has some extremely deprived communities, particularly in the south and east of the city. We have found on a number of occasions, for instance, St Mellons has had a particular concentration of issues as far as children and families are concerned and by some indicators is amongst the most problematic areas and by other indicators just falls off the edge of certain aspects of funding. Do you look carefully at the different indicators and the targeting of resources at particular groups within particular communities?

Mr Thomas: We do. Where you have a place like Cardiff where you have the headquarter effect and, indeed, the Chairman referred to Sustrans helping Neath Port Talbot, you will find in all probability that if it was part of the large grant that we gave, that money is shown against Bristol because that is the Sustrans headquarters, unless it was a very specific project which was applied for for Neath Port Talbot. We do analyse that kind of distortion where you get that large figure and we try and break it down and say what is left after we take out the headquarters, does it make sense or is it something that needs intervention.

Q26 Mr David Jones: You refer in your memorandum to the community asset transfer programme which you have launched in partnership with the Welsh Assembly Government. You tell us it is a £13 million programme. How much of that has been allocated or earmarked for allocation so far and on what sort of project?

Mr Thomas: The first round is only now in, so I am afraid I cannot answer that.

Q27 Mr David Jones: It is early days yet.

Mr Thomas: Hopefully by Christmas, perhaps just in the new year, we should know which organisations are being invited to submit more formal applications in terms of the first round of that particular funding. There has been an exceptionally interesting response. We had about 150 organisations at our detailed briefing for that programme, so it is clearly exciting a lot of interest. Both the community asset transfer and the work we are doing with the Wales European Funding Office in terms of life skills help voluntary organisations because they only needed to make one application to access what are really two sources of funds, in this case an Assembly fund and secondly ours, and in the case of the life skills, European funding and ours. It simplifies the process for the voluntary bodies.

Q28 Mr David Jones: You have announced plans to spend around £250 million in Wales between now and 2015 and have said you are going to look at reducing poverty and improving quality of life for the elderly, promoting the citizen's voice, tackling climate change and supporting social innovation. The Assembly Government's One Wales document refers to its policy objectives, which include personalisation of public services, climate change and social harmony. To what extent would you say that your work is reflecting the policy objectives of the Assembly Government?

Mr Thomas: It reflects more, if you like, the objectives that we are set in terms of BIG Lottery by the directions that we receive both from DCMS and as modified in Wales by the Welsh Assembly Government. That said, what was interesting was the priorities that we have identified came out of quite a good set of public consultation, both recently and in the past, as issues which actually concern people. If I take the elderly, it was something which concerned us that we had a disproportionate amount of applications in the past from groups other than the elderly, so we were anxious to target them this time round. Climate change is an issue that has come up fairly regularly in terms of environmental regulations and we group them together. It made sense for us to look at and bring the group of programmes we have into one strategic programme.

Q29 Mr David Jones: I wonder if you could help me a little in connection with the way you work. You have explained in your memorandum that you are a non-departmental public body sponsored by DCMS and are accountable to Parliament through the Secretary of State for Culture. You say that the Secretary of State has the legal power to tell you what factors you must take into account when making grants, and this is done typically through policy directions. Who issues those policy directions?

Ms Doyle: The Welsh Assembly Government in partnership with DCMS.

Q30 Mr David Jones: What I am wondering is if in the relatively near future we have a change of government here at Westminster, to what extent are you anticipating, if at all, that that change of government and maybe a different set of policy objectives may be in conflict with the Welsh Assembly Government and may cause you some difficulties?

Mr Thomas: That is a difficult question to answer.

Q31 Mr David Jones: I am sure not unanticipated though.

Mr Thomas: It would be true to say that we are certainly looking at that. The fact remains there is a legal arrangement whereby directions are issued to us, but in the devolved countries they are issued by the devolved governments. Scotland issues their own. At the time we carried out the Big Thinking, Scotland conducted a review of their own directions in Wales where the same directions as we had in the past were carried forward. They are ones which flow from a central set of directions issued by the DCMS. If it would help, Chairman, I would be quite happy to provide copies of those directions to the Committee.

Mr David Jones: That would be interesting. Thank you.

Q32 Chairman: Thank you very much. Those are all the questions we have. It does occur to me that we have an ongoing inquiry into the economic benefits of the Olympics and Paralympics and you have suffered as a consequence of the Olympics and Paralympics. We are particularly interested in the impact of training camps where they have been designed to be located in different parts of Wales and I just wonder whether you have reflected on that and whether or not you would be engaged in any sort of cultural or sporting or educational projects to see what benefits there will be value-added that you could give to local groups. I would not necessarily want you to respond to that now, but perhaps you could think about it and send us a note.

Mr Thomas: I would be very happy to send a supplementary memorandum on that.

Chairman: Thank you very much. It has been a most productive morning, we are most grateful to you. Thank you.