Boards draw flak for capital project failures

back to the contents page

Make sure you receive your fair share of lottery cash - take out a no-obligation trial subscription today.

Two major reports in November have severely criticised the handling of millions of Lottery funds, by the Arts Council of Wales and Sport England. The Auditor General for Wales presented his report to the Welsh National Assembly on the ACW’s handling of the failed Cardiff Centre for Visual Arts. The project was an early capital venture for ACW’s Lottery budget, receiving its first grant of £2m in 1995. In all ACW contributed £3.2m in Lottery funding, of the total £8.8m cost of the centre (plus more revenue finance from grant-in-aid). The auditors criticise pretty well every aspect of ACW’s handling of the project, from the approval of the original proposal, which it says was based on unsound projections, through monitoring of implementation, to its approach to the winding-up and dispersal of assets when the centre closed in November 2000 after 14 months of operation.

ACW, in the middle of a comprehensive organisational restructuring, says that it has overhauled its procedures for handling large, complex projects since 1999, although the final phase of the disastrous CVA events did not take place until 2000-2001. One of the most salutary paragraphs in the official report notes that: ‘The Council’s lottery application form requires the applicant to answer the question: “What are your contingency plans in the event of substantial problems arising with the project?” The application by the Cardiff Old Library Trust did not answer this question but just provided the name of the Trustee that they planned to make responsible for project monitoring. The Arts Council of Wales did not press the applicant for contingency plans at this or any other stage in the project.’ A week later, the parliamentary select committee on culture, media and sport made a sweeping denunciation of the government fiasco that led to the cancellation of the Pickett’s Lock national athletics stadium and £120m of Lottery funding ploughed into the rebuilding of Wembley stadium which may now never happen.

None of the principal players in the long-running drama remain unscathed in the Select Committee report, including Sport England: ‘The Government had no business effectively to rewrite the terms of a Lottery Funding Agreement to which it was not a party. Equally Sport England had no business allowing this to happen and deserves censure for being so slack and negligent.’ The committee has called for the Public Accounts Committee and the National Audit Office to further investigate the Wembley Lottery Funding Agreement between Sport England and the Football Association.

The full AGW report is available at www.agw.wales.gov.uk The Culture Select Committee’s report can be read at http://www.publications.parlia-ment.uk/pa/cm/cmcumeds.htm