The Fair Funding league tables

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Murray Macdonald introduces our third annual analysis of lottery funding vs deprivation in England and Wales 

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It is now six years since the Labour government came to power promising that no one would be disadvantaged by where they live; five years since the creation of an additional lottery distributor working to explicit government programmes; and two years since the minister with responsibility for lottery, Tessa Jowell, promised a fair share of funds to communities. What has actually happened?

The annual deprivation analysis is the third that I have undertaken for Lottery Monitor and this year is more reliable than ever, thanks to the continuing refinement and development of the Lottery Monitor league tables. This, and the ability to compare three years’ data, has enabled the development of the only nationally reliable and consistent picture of the impact that lottery funding has had in tackling area-based deprivation. 

Table 1, Lottery Monitor / Mcdonald fair funding table England 2002

As in previous years I have overlaid each of the six indices of multiple deprivation for England and Wales with the Lottery Monitor league table. (We cannot do the same exercise for Scotland, as it has no equivalent to the district-based IMD to allow us to map the lottery grants.) Using the average lottery award per head of population as a base, I am able to determine what would be the ‘fair’ average award per head required to reflect each area’s deprivation. The difference between what is ‘fair’ and the amount received provides a simple but accurate ranking for each local authority area. When the rankings for all six indices are combined, a comprehensive league table can be generated.

Has anything changed?
Remember, to read our Fair Funding tables, you need to think upside down. In the same manner as the government’s index of multiple deprivation, the top-placed areas represent the most unfair situations: least funding, most deprivation. A negative change in position from 2001 to 2002 therefore shows improvement in lottery funding, while a positive one represents a decline relative to deprivation level. The table of overall losers and gainers (Table 1) shows, once again, that Barnsley, Westminster and City of London have had the most unfair share of lottery awards in the country, Barnsley because it is the largest loser and the two London boroughs because they have, as always, done very disproportionately well. In fact the most ‘over-funded’ 30 have all held their rankings pretty well (the obvious exception being Brent, see box at end), while at the opposite extreme

Table 2, Biggest movers

(the most unfairly treated), the depressing news is that the rankings of 17 out of the worst-off 30 have deteriorated this past year. 

The five largest shifts in ranking (Table 2) show Rother, Charnwood and

Table 3, Lottery Monitor / McDonald Fair Funding Wales 2002

Watford all improving their positions, while four London boroughs – Hackney, Tower Hamlets, Hammersmith & Fulham and Lambeth – have dropped down heavily. In Wales (Table 3) there has been little change from last year, although both Blaenau Gwent and Merthyr Tydfil have made improvements. However, the net gainers continue in exactly the same manner as before. Barnsley has featured as the biggest loser each year; by now it has received less than a quarter of the funding it should have had if Labour had delivered upon its commitment to community equality. This is despite the Community Fund’s Brass for Barnsley initiative three years ago which was supposed to have kick-started a capacity-building process there, and which was the inspiration if not the model for Fair Share. As the years roll on, and there is no measurable improvement, the scale of the problem looks increasingly insurmountable. To move Barnsley to its ‘average’ position would require a cash injection of more than £50m, a figure that puts the entire Fair Share allocation into perspective.

Fair Share
How does the inequality gap look for the rest of the Fair Share areas? To remind you of the background: Fair Share authorities were selected a year ago, not according to our index but based on how well they had done against two lottery averages, Community Fund grants to deprived communities; and the rest of the boards’ grants to deprived communities. (And note, the specific measures of

Table 4, England fair share

Table 5, Wales Fair share

Table 6, Rural Fair Share

deprivation used were also much more selective than our grand average of IMD.) Extra funds are being channelled to Fair Share areas via the Community Fund and, over a longer time-period, through NOF. The Rural Fair Share scheme is new, with the announcement of the areas only coming late last year, so we will have to wait a year before we can expect to see any impact (Table 6). An examination of the main Fair Share scheme after its first nine months of operation in England (Table 4) and Wales (Table 5) reveals a depressing picture. In both countries the position of the targeted authorities, far from improving, has so far deteriorated overall. The England scheme targets 51 local authority areas; 33 have worsened, and one, Barnsley, has remained the same. Of the five target areas in Wales, four have deteriorated. These are early days for the scheme; we have not yet been through a full year of concentrated funding and support. But these are nevertheless disturbing results, which should give all lottery distributors cause to re-examine urgently their own contributions to the worsening funding fairness gap. As for the government, it never tires of telling those of us within local government that the process is only the means to the end. What counts is swift, real and measurable improvement on the ground, yet so far the government, and in particular Tessa Jowell, have not delivered on the lottery promise.

Next year will be the crunch for Fair Share, as money is rolled out into the chosen areas by both CF and NOF. The Lottery Monitor / Macdonald Fair Funding analysis will provide an objective independent assessment of whether the scheme really is working, or whether the distributors and the DCMS need to go back to the drawing board. 

Murray Macdonald is a regeneration manager at North East Lincolnshire Council; contact him on murray.macdonald@nelincs.gov.uk

Brent
A word about Brent. Lottery Monitordecided this year to reallocate the £120m spent on Wembley back in to Brent’s total, as the project is now proceeding. For this year only, the effect is to give Brent some spectacular swings in its year-on-year data. Without the Wembley effect, Brent’s Fair Funding position shows a small decline of three places, up from no 8 to no 5 in our league table.