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All for one, one for all
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From April 2002 the small-grants scheme Awards for All England, enters an important new phase when it becomes a fully integrated joint-distributor programme. A4A England’s director, Mike Wilkins, answers questions about scheme changes, promotion and the Golden Jubilee
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Q: How will the ‘joint pot’ work?
A: Rather than having five separate budgets, each of which has its own assessment criteria and level of spend, all the distributors will put whatever monies they can afford into the same pot. So the Heritage pound will be indistinguishable from the Community Fund pound. Decisions will be made against a single set of criteria, jointly agreed by all the distributors, and a single budget.
Q: How much money will be available?
A: There will be £41.1m for the coming financial year. The commitment over a two-year period is £80m.
Q: How has the financial split been worked out between distributors?
A: It roughly mirrors the demand on the programme when they were operating individual portfolios. But each distributor has decided on its contribution on the basis of its own strategic plans, its forward commitments, and how much it can afford to spend. Also, they have made their commitments in the light of the overall spend in the past year. We are likely to spend rather less than £40m, because we dropped off after the end of the Millennium phase and we haven’t refocused ourselves. The Golden Jubilee is producing a surge of applications, so we may be returning to Millennium Festival levels of applications, where we were having to process huge numbers of applications extremely quickly.
Q: So next year’s budget is a real-terms decrease on this year’s?
A: It’s a decrease on the budget but an increase on the spend. This year’s budget was about £55m, with NOF coming in halfway through the year with a large amount of money. All the distributors have said that if the demand for fundable applications shows there is significant demand, we can come back part way through the year and ask for more. Under the joint scheme, the maximum we can distribute is £75m a year, which is way in excess of our current budget, so it does allow the distributors to put more money into the pot if they feel that’s justified.
Q: Will funding decisions still be made by the nine regional committees? A: Yes. But we will also be looking on a pilot basis at staff making decisions. Initially they will shadow committee decision-making. We would be keen to delegate certain decisions to officers to enable the turn-around of applications to be quicker, which is consistent with the recommendations of the last Quest report and also with the practices of some distributors. The kinds of awards that might be delegated would have to be straightforward, not raising any policy issues, not anything likely to be contested.
Q: When will you have a result from the pilot exercise?
A: In a year’s time – more quickly if possible.
Q: Will the joint pot bring any changes in turnaround times?
A: Not yet, no. They remain at three months.
Q: Are you making changes to the rules governing maximum turnover of applicant organisations?
A: NOF’s arrival has broadened the scope. We are able to fund parish and town councils, health bodies and schools, for instance, none of which in their own right is a small
organisation. But the activity we will be funding in all cases will be small-scale community activity. And we won’t be funding anything that a statutory body has as its statutory responsibility. We are well aware that the resources of statutory bodies could flood the
pro-gramme with small-scale applications which wouldn’t allow us to fund other community-based activities. In the past we’ve operated an informal cap of £15,000, so that if you have an income greater than that your application would be
deprioritised. We’ve now changed that slightly, so the limit is £20,000 and if your application is from a smaller group you will get an extra mark in our scoring system.
Q: Are there any other changes people should be aware of?
A: Awards for All has a national Steering Committee, which runs the scheme, made up of paid representatives from each of the five distributors. In future, that body will be renamed the Programme Board and the chairs of the nine regional committees will also sit on it. So there will be a real sense that the programme is being governed by the people making the decisions locally. At a regional level we are offering the opportunity for the committees to have four ‘stakeholders’ within the region, people who will be able to talk about the
needs of the community activist sector in the region. So we’re attempting to strengthen the grass-roots element of the committees.
The role of the local authority lottery officers
Q: How will all these changes affect Awards for All in the rest of the UK? A: England is the only programme which has gone for the joint scheme. The others will still be working on the cooperation model. I think they’re quite interested to see what happens in England as an experiment.
Q: How many pages are there in the new application form?
A: Same as before. But we’ve shifted some of the extra monitoring information into a separate pull-out section. And the guidance is now alongside the relevant question.
Q: Is the form available on-line?
A: Yes, from mid-April (www.awardsforall.org.uk).
Q: How are you going to make sure you award a larger number of grants than you managed this year?
A: I don’t think that’s going to be so much of a problem, because if the current level of applications – 2,500 a week – continues, we will be able to spend the money without promoting the scheme at all. What is more important is that we focus our resources on those groups likely to benefit most. Each regional committee of A4A has a regional focus, which is part of the assessment of applications. The regional focus is included in each application pack sent out.
All the regional focus statements are
being reviewed right now. We will be establishing performance indicators for the programme which will also have a regional dimension to them, and we’ll put those in the public domain.
Q: Are you planning to do targeted promotions?
A: Yes. We want to reach the regional focus places by using extremely local networks: free newspapers, local radio, local supermarkets. We’ll be making available a significant but limited resource in each region to enable our local teams to buy in expertise to get our message to those particular groups.
Q: How big is your promotion budget? A: We have £320,000 to spend over the next year, which comes out of our administration budget of £3.5m.
Q: Is there an upper limit on Golden Jubilee applications?
A: No, theoretically every application we fund could be a Golden Jubilee application.
Q: Is there anything distinctive about a Golden Jubilee application?
A: We do not define what is a Golden Jubilee application. It is for the applicant to do that. So we can’t comment on whether there is a typical application.
Q: Do people get priority for being a Golden Jubilee application?
A: No.
Q: Are you giving money away for street parties?
A: Yes, if it’s part of something that would be fundable under an A4A scheme
anyway. If an application came forward solely for food and drink, bunting, etc, and it was not able to meet the other aims of A4A, it might not get funded.
Q: Are you going to run into processing problems for applications?
A: We have put contingency money aside in case we have very high levels of Golden Jubilee applications. But if they start coming in in droves in May, and expect a turn-around in time for the June celebration dates, that will be very difficult. We do try to ensure that potential applicants know there is a lead time.
Q: Is there a danger that this will disrupt the timescale for non-Jubilee A4A applications?
A: We hope not. Our latest figures show 89% success in hitting our turn-around times and we anticipate improving on that.
Q: Have you done any analysis on where the gaps are in the delivery of A4A in relation to Fair Share?
A: We have only just got the list of the areas and we will be doing this exercise. I really hope that all five distributors will come to a common approach to allow A4A to make a full contribution to Fair Share.
