Fair Share wrangle over selection of target areas

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Jane Taylor reports on delays to the scheme and the prospect of a wider government Lottery funding review.

Eight months after Tessa Jowell, Culture Secretary, announced the £150m Fair Share scheme for community groups in deprived areas – and two months prior to its scheduled launch – the two distributors jointly responsible for running the programme have still not finalised the list of which 50 areas will benefit. 

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The Community Fund and NOF have been working on the list since last August, and had expected to have announced the areas involved by October. The modelling exercise, which had to identify areas of deprivation that have also done badly out of the Lottery, proved to be more tricky than anticipated, setting the expected announcement date back, first to November, then mid December. Even the most recently agreed date of February 11 had, at the time of writing, been abandoned. The DCMS Secretary of State is said to have imposed a deadline of February 18, but at the end of January government sources were not confident that this would be met. 

For England, the Fair Share list has become a matter of acute political sensitivity. The CF, after consulting, drew up an initial list of the 39 English targets for submission to the DCMS based on the same deprivation methodology it uses for its own regional allocations. This ensured a geographical spread of target areas. The CF also added in a rural weighting factor, to guarantee that there would be at least one rural district in every region outside London. Awards of more than £1m were discounted. Lottery Monitor has obtained the original list of 39 English districts submitted to theDCMS last autumn (see page 16). 

The DCMS has consistently maintained that its role has been limited to ‘making suggestions’ on the selection of districts, but other insiders say that the department rejected the CF’s list and sent back its own alternative, which the boards felt lacked methodological consistency (ie, it would not be publicly defensible). A ‘compromise’ list is still being worked on. Lottery Monitor understands that the Secretary of State objected specifically to the inclusion of a regional spread and a rural weighting. Government sources say they cannot understand why the boards didn’t just use the official Index of Multiple Deprivation 2000 as their starting point. 

In a similar exercise carried out for Lottery Monitor last year (see April 2001 issue), Murray MacDonald, lottery officer at North-east Lincolnshire, produced a ranking of districts that had fared worst from the Lottery and were also relatively high up the IMD. This exercise reveals the top of the league to be dominated by north-west and urban districts. Of the 39 English districts in the original CF list, 18 are said to have survived into the latest version. By removing the regional spread, north-west districts are likely to increase from seven to 14, and all four south-east nominees will be displaced. 

MacDonald’s article also highlighted a phenomenon that the DCMS has subsequently admitted to be a problem: some very deprived areas have in fact done well out of the Lottery, and conversely some of those whose Lottery take has been lowest are not particularly deprived. A final complicating factor is the disparities in funding between boards. Among some potential target areas, it seems that while their overall Lottery receipts are low, their Community Fund grant income has been very high. There is concern among the boards that Fair Share may end up delivering less redistribution than it promises because of this distortion – in simple terms, the money that CF/NOF will have to commit would probably have found its way to the same localities anyway. Some insiders are even talking of Fair Share as being ‘fatally flawed’. 

Table: Not the fair share List

Distribution boards and DCMS alike are all maintaining polite official silence. A NOF spokesperson said: ‘We have to be able to robustly defend the list. We are happy with the list.’ The Community Fund’s spokesperson said: ‘The methodology has been through a number of revisions. Our job is to work with NOF to come up with a sensible solution.’ But behind the scenes the boards are increasingly anxious about the tight timescale for the programme’s launch. 

The distribution boards are collectively on the defensive, however, as Tessa Jowell has made it clear that she intends to pursue other familiar Lottery-funding themes over the coming months in an effort to shake up the system a bit. 

The distributors were called to a summit meeting with the Culture Secretary in January to discuss some of these. Among the themes preoccupying the DCMS, and likely to be the subject of ministerial announcements in coming weeks and months, are: how best to continue the drive towards regional, targeted, strategic use of Lottery funds; how to improve and streamline first-time applicants’ experience of the Lottery; how to enforce joined-up processes, so that multipurpose, cross-disciplinary projects are not disadvantaged; how to increase the public profile of Lottery projects and tie this in with ticket purchasing; and last but not least the extremely overdue announcement of the review into the future of the Lottery franchise.