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Quest tackles bureaucracy
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When Lottery boards process larger grant applications, they take too long, are too inflexible, don’t give adequate support and fail to communicate with applicants. These are likely to be the main conclusions of the latest Lottery investigation by the Department of Culture’s independent standards watchdog Quest.
Quest has followed up its August 2000 report on small grants with an inquiry into the applications procedures of the five main Lottery boards for grants of £100,000-plus. At the time of writing Quest is in final discussions with the distributors about its findings and recommendations, after which it will present them to Tessa Jowell, DCMS Secretary of State.
The main messages will come as no surprise to Lottery Monitor’s readers. According to Tim Suter, chief executive of Quest, applicants are most exercised by the ‘incredibly long time’ the boards can take to decide on their bids. And while there is evidence that the introduction of two-stage bids has cut the waiting time for in-principle agreement, it has extended the total time taken for full bid approval.
‘The other thing that really upsets people, Suter says, ‘is the lack of flexibility: they get clobbered by a process that doesn’t seem to be quite suitable for them, and they’re not sure who it is suitable for.’
Quest also found frustration among applicants at long silences that happened once their bid had gone in, and about the transparency of programme rules (such as whether annual budget allocations mean there are particularly good – or bad – times of year to submit a particular bid).
The good news, Quest will acknowledge, is that the boards are starting to respond seriously to these long-standing criticisms. But the standards body will warn that in making much needed improvements, the boards are likely to have to face a whole new set of dilemmas. In their efforts to short-cut bureaucracy and get significant amounts of cash to areas of social exclusion, the boards are trying to become more proactive, taking in-principle funding decisions at an earlier stage and then working closely with groups to nurture their proposals through the full business planning process.
Inevitably, not all of these more embryonic ideas will come good: the price of taking riskier decisions is a higher level of failure – and its attendant publicity. Suter says: ‘If the Lottery is to be a funder of risk projects, then we need a grown-up dialogue about how that works. We need an informed conversation about accepting that projects will fail, rather than a hysterical conversation the moment something doesn’t quite work.’