After Thoughts by Jane Taylor

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Reading the report of the National Audit Office into the Community Fund’s handling of its awards to NCADC makes me go hot and cold. I was strongly in support of the CF’s original backing for the organisation, taking on trust, as we all have to do with every grant it makes, that the decision-making behind the award was sound. I was supportive because I believe the lottery is both big enough and an appropriate vehicle to fund popular and unpopular causes.

I strongly suspect that I am in a shrinking minority in holding this view. As the going gets tougher for the lottery, politically and financially, the unpopular causes are the first candidates to be thrown overboard, either because ‘we can’t afford to fund them’ or because ‘they tarnish the image, which affects lottery sales’, or both.

The NAO report has turned up the heat by suggesting that the CF needs to be far more ‘context aware’ in making judge-ments about what to fund. My political antennae tell me this is code for ‘Learn to recognise a group that’s too hot to handle – and keep away from it!’ On the other hand, my jaw drops when I read that the second NCADC award passed through the then England Committee of the CF without discussion or question. Nodded through, it was, on the strength of a first project end-of-grant-review report condemned by the NAO as ‘poor quality’, alongside an assessment score which it turned out was wrong, ignoring a £9,000 discrepancy in the final accounts for the first grant, and with asylum-seekers topping the charts for the nth month in succession as the public’s most vilified outcast group. So I cannot disagree with the NAO’s repeated calls for risk-assessment and risk-profiling. I guess I just assumed, when I first noticed the standard ‘presentational issues’ paragraph attached to every NOF board report, that all the distributors followed similarly sensible corporate practices. But I was wrong, and am left with a sense of unease. The Community Fund is pushing ahead at the moment with its exciting but undeniably experimental ‘investor approach’. As the NAO points out, this will require bucket-loads of judgement to be exercised and is likely to be a more high-risk method of grant-making, which means more controversy and high-profile failures to come. Is the Community Fund up to handling the political and media scrutiny this will generate? On my reading of the NAO’s findings in the NCADC case, the distributor has its work cut out.

Don’t be fooled, now
Private Eye’s Ad Nauseam column made me giggle this week. They ran a piece about Camelot’s latest set of ads, which as I am sure you all know, feature various lottery grant recipients saying nice things about their awards and the lottery. ‘The implication,’ the Eye opines, ‘is an act of charity rather than a business transaction and it looks very much like a breach of both Camelot’s own code of practice... and the ITC rules for television advertising.’ I asked the press officer at the ITC if they had followed up the Eye’s concern. The press officer giggled, too, and said in disbelief: ‘Are they trying to suggest that people don’t know why they buy lottery tickets?’ She looked up her complaints log and discovered lots of people who’d got upset at Billy Connolly, some who are still going on about the Dome, but not a single person fretting that they’d been duped into handing over a quid to their newsagent in the belief that they were donating it to charity, receiving instead the insult of a winning lottery ticket...