More than the sum of the parts

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Jill Pitkeathley, chair of the New Opportunities Commission, discusses the forthcoming merger between her board and the Community Fund with Jane Taylor

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Now that the Community Fund’s board has given its go-ahead for the merger, is it a done deal? 
Absolutely. And the process we’re going forward to is that there are two groups formed between the two organisations: an officers’ group and a joint sub-committee of both boards, with four members from each, alternately chaired by Diana Brittan and myself. The DCMS will be represented on that joint sub-committee as well. So it’s moving on, I’m happy to say.

And is legislation still destined for 2004-05?
Yes, though one can never pre-empt what’s going to be in any Queen’s Speech. But there are strong messages from the Secretary of State that the merger can happen administratively before that – she wants that to happen during the course of next year.

Can the body be fully merged and operational ahead of the legislative processes?
That’s certainly our understanding. The Community Fund’s lease expires on their building at the end of next year and they’re very happy to move in here and we expect to be operating in the closest possible way by then – or possibly before.

Has anyone yet done the business case for merger?
I think that will be part of the work the officers’ group does. We’re certainly producing more figures for the Secretary of State. 

Will there be savings?
Inevitably there will be savings arising from any merger. But I think using the business case as the reason for the merger doesn’t really get us anywhere. …. If all you do is to bring the functions of NOF and the Community Fund together, there’s not a lot of point in it. The Secretary of State has been very clear in all the meetings that she wants the new organisation to be more than the sum of the parts.

How close does the ‘vision document’ come to satisfying the Secretary of State’s wishes in describing the shape of the new organisation?
It’s a very good first step. Some of the things in there – guarantees for the voluntary sector and so on – are set in stone, but some of the things the new organisa-tion does and the way it does them will be for it to decide, not for NOF or the Community Fund or even the Secretary of State. 

One live issue of concern is devolution both in terms of the home countries and the English regions.
These are decisions for the new organisa-tion and I don’t think we can pre-empt that except to say that in terms of devo-lution of the countries, you cannot row back from a position you are already in. The Secretary of State said in the recent meeting with the voluntary sector that it’s perfectly possible to have some UK-wide programmes and some devolved programmes.

OK, but as a minimum position would you envisage that the current level of devolved structures – which are more advanced for the Community Fund than your own – will stay?
I can’t tell you. I can’t see any possibility that the new organisation would want to row back from that, but I can’t give guarantees. Some of that discussion will have to happen at political level.

At that voluntary sector meeting with the Secretary of State, the question of the legal form of the new distributor was also raised. Is it a serious issue?
As far as we are aware the Secretary of State intends that the new organisation will be an NDPB (non departmental public body). I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t be an NDPB. 

The argument is about how you guarantee arm’s length operation, autonomy, independence….
It doesn’t matter what structure you have, the process of keeping arm’s length is one of constant negotiation and constant vigilance. NOF was already in negotiation with the government long before there was any talk of merger about having our policy directions given to us across much broader programme themes. Those negotiations are ongoing and I hope will be carried forward into discussions about the new body. I have to say that although NOF’s policy directions are given to us by the government, we have never had any interference whatsoever about individual grant decisions or methods of delivery.

But grant-giving is a separate process from the higher level of programme formulation …
The government is not going to give up the handle it has on the ‘NOF bit’ of the money. But there will be at least two kinds of programme: the open programme and the strategic programmes. Tessa’s made it very clear that even if she wanted to she can’t change the division within the lottery distribution fund anyway. So let’s be politically realistic about this. 

How much big thinking has gone on about what this new body will evolve into?
We had a tremendously exciting session at my board awayday about this. That’s why I do feel extremely positive about the new organisation. We have done tremendous work at NOF over the past five years but I detect in my board and my staff not one trace of ‘dog in the manger’ because they are able to see what the prize might be for disadvantaged individuals and communities in the better use of lottery money. That’s what this new organisation gives us. That’s why we mustn’t be too fenced in by the difficulties of merging. 

New Distributor Grants programme - an illustration of how they might look

You have put some ambitious and welcome statements in the vision document about improving on current performance: shorter turn-around times, being more proactive, single door entry for applicants, pre-application support, initiating joint programmes with other distributors. These are quite lofty promises. Just take pre-application support: that suggests a level of resourc-ing that the Community Fund has found impossible to come up with … 
We and the Community Fund have learnt many lessons that can be fed into the new organisation. They are lofty promises. Some of them are expensive, but not all. There will be some savings in delivery. If you work with other organisations for pre-application support, you maybe look at having less monitoring for smaller amounts of money, for example. You have to be very flexible about how these things could happen. 

You’ve put addressing disadvantage at the heart of the new organisation. The lottery has a problem, increasing with each passing year, about how you ensure fairer geographical distribution. Do you really think you are going to be able to crack this? 
The reason I ever applied to do this job was because it was targeting lottery money on disadvantage. I’m not interested in giving money to the Royal Opera House. It’s about the difference it can make to deprived individuals and communities. It won’t be easy, but it can be done.

We were charged with focusing our Healthy Living Centres programme on the most disadvantaged 20% of the population, and that’s exactly what has been done. With Out of School Hours Learning, we targeted against indices of deprivation. The same thing has happened with PE and Sport in schools. So although we certainly haven’t done as much as I hope the new organisation will, we have got some track record. Like the issue of keeping independent, this is an issue of constant vigilance and the new organisation will have to be constantly testing itself. 

One of the more economically efficient ways of getting money out to cold spots is allocation. It’s loved by local authorities but it makes the voluntary sector suspicious and resentful. How are you going to manage that split?
I don’t know, but I do know that some element of allocation will remain. Local authorities are tremendously variable in their efficiency and in their intention of delivering, and I hope the new organisa-tion will have an element of post-grant scrutiny and development work to enable the money to be used most effectively. You can enable the good local authority to talk to the bad local authority and learn from each other. We have done that with some of our programmes and it has been effective.

But how do you get beyond the local authority and penetrate the community level?
We’re looking at all different ways of doing that: through neighbourhood action zones, through the voluntary sector, through the umbrella bodies of the voluntary sector, and organisations on the ground that work very closely with communities. There are suggestions that some elements of the new fund should be subject to tick boxes by local communities about where they want the money spent. We’ll see whether that will come about! 

Tick boxes have been a running theme of this government review. Do you see that kind of decision making and public involvement having a role?
I can see no reason why it shouldn’t have a role for some of the funding. It’s not easy. But since it has been raised on so many occasions by the Secretary of State, I wouldn’t be surprised to see that there was an element of that.

Are you likely to maintain the Community Fund-type arrangement of ‘by lot’ members?
I couldn’t comment on the structure of governance of the new organisation. That’s for the joint board to discuss.

Do you see the new distributor maintaining the breadth of causes that have been supported particularly by the Community Fund? 
If we are taking disadvantage as a theme, I don’t see how you can narrow the field, because it has to be about the most disadvantaged people in society. And I think the Secretary of State has given a guarantee that international grants would remain. 

Aside from the merger, are there any other lottery review issues that you think are particularly important?
Greater promotion; greater cooperation between the distribution bodies, greater clarity about the lottery in terms of the public message. I think the Joint Promotional Unit is going to have a very important role there.

If the new distributor could help make sense of the tangled mass of funding streams available at local and regional level to help signpost the way through the funding system, we should look at that. Think of all the funding available for neighbourhoods, for instance, across all kinds of themes. Maybe the new distributor could have some helpful role there…

The notion of added value is core to defining NOF’s purpose and presumably will carry over into the new distributor. But it is difficult for people to quantify. How will you demonstrate that everything you do has added value?
How does anybody carry that out? How does the voluntary sector prove that it has added value when it delivers a programme for, say, Asian mothers to learn how better

to feed their children? I don’t know how the new organisation is going to prove that, I just know it’s got to be one of the guiding tenets: is there added value in the lottery doing this? 

What are the main lessons you have learnt from the NOF experience?
I’ve learnt that giving out money is not simple, and that however much money you’ve got, you are dependent on the effi cacy of your partnerships and the relationships you develop. I’ve also learnt that sometimes even small amounts of money can absolutely transform a com munity, an individual and sometimes a whole profession. I’m very proud of that

What are the lessons you’ve learnt through failure, things not working out?
You must have realistic expectations about how long it takes to form partner ships, particularly if they don’t already exist. Sometimes we’ve tried to do that more quickly than is realistic. But the other side is that there’s never harm in having timescale targets, because it makes you move on and look at innovative ways of doing things.