League tables reveal fewer awards in 2001

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For the first time since Lottery funding began, the average value of awards made by the distribution boards rose last year, up from £43,000 in 2000 to nearly £55,000. Along with this movement against the trend there was a corresponding switch in numbers of grants made: down for the first time in four years from 24,500 in 2000 to just over 19,800. These findings appear in Lottery Monitor’s annual league tables of Lottery funding published today. 

The reason for the shift is that Awards for All, the cross-distributor small awards scheme, gave out nearly 5,000 fewer grants in 2001: 10,700 compared with 15,600 in 2000. Mike Wilkins, director of A4A England, confirms that the scheme underspent on its 2001 budget, putting this down to a ‘year of transition’. 

‘The Millennium Festival scheme,’ he says, ‘attracted huge numbers of applications, especially towards the end of its life, precisely because it had a deadline. That closed in June 2000, and last year was spent in transition between the end of the Millennium awards and NOF coming into the scheme. We haven’t marketed A4A as assiduously as we might have done because we didn’t know what the impact of those two big changes would be.’ 

In short, A4A has given out fewer awards because it has had fewer applications. Wilkins says the distributors have agreed to a national and regional marketing programme to boost awareness of the scheme when the next financial year begins in April, targeting supermarkets, post offices and other very local community contact points. However, because of the underspend on this year’s £55m budget, A4A England is likely to get nearer to £40m next year.

Apart from the reduction in grants, the Lottery Monitor annual league tables show the East Midlands, Scotland and Northern Ireland as the main gainers over the past year, with the East Midlands comfortably out in front. This should be encouraging to the region, as its 1995-2001 position overall shows that per head of population it still falls short of the UK average by 30p in the £1. 

London continues its steady downward ‘correction’ in terms of Lottery spend per head: while it remains comfortably top of the Lottery spend league at 162% of average, it was actually beaten by Northern Ireland in terms of the per head value of Lottery awards for last year. Perhaps the more significant loser last year was the north-west, performing poorly against its overall average position. 

The full league tables can be found here