Merger details revealed

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The shape and scope of a new distributor have become clearer in a key new document. Jane Taylor reports

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The Community Fund and NOF continue to stumble towards their proposed merger with the publication and then swift removal from public view of a joint document that fills in quite a lot of detail about a new merged distributor.

Shaping a New Distributor, or the ‘vision document’, as it is being termed, was posted on the Community Fund’s website on 25 April without any publicity, but a day after the CF’s chief executive, Richard Buxton, had written to all grant-holders, directing them to the website for ‘key documents and important information’. The document had disappeared again by early May, due to ‘technical difficulties’, according to a spokesperson. The Community Fund had posted the paper without agreement from NOF and ahead of its board meeting on 20 May which is to decide whether or not to back the merger. Penny Mordaunt, CF’s new head of public affairs, said: ‘The document has been seen by all board members and they gave their approval to submit it to the Secretary of State. We’ve done that because the timetable is not in our hands.’ Mordaunt confirmed that the CF will issue a shortened version of the paper over the next week or so.

As it stands, the document heavily reflects some informal speculative work done for the DCMS by NOF last autumn. But it has something for everyone, addressing the key concerns of the voluntary sector head-on right at the start, covering each of the Community Fund board’s eight demands (see Lottery Monitor Feb issue) and peppered with proposals designed to address the preoccupations of the Secretary of State (one-stop shop, local involvement in lottery decisions, single application form, speedier processing, joint distributor working.) The document makes a powerful pitch for a new, pre-eminent distributor, whose role is both to be first among lottery equals and also to begin to spread its domain into other areas of funding, voluntary sector coordination and promotional activity.

Stephen Bubb, chief executive of Acevo, said: ‘It is quite good. I like the way it hints at a balance between open access programmes and partnership-based strategic work.’ Acevo was among a number of UK-wide voluntary sector bodies invited to a key meeting with the Culture Secretary at the end of April to discuss their anxieties about the proposed merger. The chairs of NOF and CF were both present. The meeting considered far greater use of delegated and devolved funding; alternative legal forms for a new distributor (see page 8) and debate about the lasting value of the millions of lottery funding that the CF has contributed thus far to capacity building in the voluntary sector. The meeting did not, however, discuss the ‘vision document’.