After Thoughts

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By Jane Taylor 

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One of the stranger visitors to pop in to our recent Scotland conference was the journo from the Daily Mail, who turned up just as we were breaking for lunch. Slightly breathless but with pen and paper ready, he inquired what the conference was about. I gave him a snappy 10-minute run-through of the issues: additionality, bureaucracy, cashflow, development support, exit strategies, follow-on funding, grant management, hydrogenated fats, incineration skills, juxtaposed brain scans… you get the idea. He took shorthand. Kept stopping –‘Could you spell that, hydrog…? What’s that about, then?’ After a while I noticed he wasn’t taking it down any more, nor even taking it in. He just looked at me, slightly irritated and very bored. Then said: ‘So what’s on this afternoon, then?’ ‘Ooh, more of the same,’ I answered, enthusiastically. ‘Do you want to stay?’ He did not. He seemed to have no idea why his London office might have sent him truffling over to Heriot Watt that morning. Kept spluttering about ‘bizarre lottery grants’, which caused me to flap my arms about wildly and stand over him menacingly. He never even made it as far as the free lunch, but retreated rapidly back to the safety of his Glasgow office.

Lies, damn lies and pure gifts
It is futile to get angry with the Daily Mail, and impossible to get even – unless you are the chief executive of a large company which places regular full-page advertising in the newspaper, in which case you just call up the editor for a chat. But why, oh why, offer up hostages to fortune? When I reported on the NCADC row last month, I rang both the organisation itself and the Community Fund to check how many previous grants it had had, and for how much. I did this because good journos check their facts, but also because none of the figures in the press reports seemed to agree. When I rechecked on the DCMS website database, I realised that this was a prime source of confusion. Although the NCADC has received just one previous award, for £191,516, the DCMS website lists two awards, each for an identical amount, but in two different years, leading to the plausible belief that these were two different awards. It seems breathtakingly bad luck that such an error should have occurred – and every bit as breathtakingly bad that neither the DCMS nor the Community Fund acted to get the database entry corrected. So the nicely rounded-up figure of £400,000 has passed into the collective media imagination as the amount already handed out. I was even more bemused by a claim that appeared in the latest wave of press invective against lottery grants for asylum-seekers. This one claimed that the Community Fund had awarded £18m of grants over the past year to refugees and asylum-seekers. Where, I asked the CF, did that figure come from? Apparently from the CF itself – a draft figure from the new annual report, which is not out for another month yet. The figure won’t appear in the report, because it has now been revised (upwards). But anyway, it includes quite a lot of ‘double counting’ (grants which relate to several categories and may not, therefore, represent awards ‘mainly’ for refugees). The more ‘pure’ figure, I am told, is £8m to £9m. So why on earth not give that one to the press, instead?

Last call for submissions to DCMS on the funding review. I did a phone round at the end of September to discover that a lot of local authorities seem to be either unaware of the review, or it is sitting at the bottom of a deep in-tray. Every lottery or external funding officer in the land should have something to say of value, and you will never have a better invitation to say it.