My prescription for the Great Big Lottery

Town & Country Planning, April 2006

I have had two brushes with National Lottery grant-making quangos in recent weeks, something I try to keep to a minimum.

              On one occasion, an opinion poll company asked me various rather simplistic questions – and my views on a scale of one to five – about the Heritage Lottery Foundation.

              On the other occasion, I found that the brief window for bidding for one of the new Big Lottery categories had been arbitrarily delayed six weeks.  Six weeks so far, that is.

              For those who have the luck not to have to deal with these vast and unaccountable bodies, I should explain two things.  One, most of the programmes run by what used to be the National Lottery Charities Board (NLCB) have long since been closed, and most of them not replaced.

              And two, the Big Lottery is the monstrous marriage of this Charities Board and another equally distant and unaccountable quango, the New Opportunities Fund.

              For a lottery watcher, as I suppose I am, all of these things range from the niggling to the downright irritating.

              It is, for example, only wholly rootless giants that commission pollsters to survey ‘opinion-formers’ about themselves – another symptom of the strange money-wasting insecurity that besets quangos from time to time.

              It is also only these quangos who get palmed off with people like me when they were clearly paying for opinion-formers, but that is another story.

              But the real sin is the mere existence of a monster like the Big Lottery, built on the fantasy that the human element can be taken out of philanthropy altogether. 

              As with the old NLCB, you have to fill in largely irrelevant forms, where you have to predict the exact racial breakdown of everyone who will be benefiting from your project in three years time, and come up with a believable untruth about how sustainable the project is – if it needs to apply for lottery funding, it probably isn’t.

              Now that it has merged seamlessly with New Opportunities, we can expect an even more hassled and disinterested class of bureaucrat delivering even more meaningless formulae to a grateful community sector.

              I’m not, of course, saying that the money they funnel through is not useful or not needed.  Quite the reverse.  I am saying that centralising this kind of system – while it may look ‘efficient’ in the narrowest possible measures: numbers of grants paid per member of staff – makes it miserably inefficient in every other way.

              Because they force local charities to perform for their favoured formulae, and to use their current buzz-words and politically-correct checklists.  They have no idea what is needed locally, no idea what works and what doesn’t, no idea of people’s hopes, fears and achievements – and care even less.

              Local lottery boards could have some kind of relationship with their beneficiaries, could see what was most important and help link people up and learn lessons.  But thanks to the fantasy of centralised efficiency in the official zeitgeist, we don’t get that.

              A friend of mine ran into trouble with a Lottery grant a few years ago (I had better mention no names).  A recycling company – one somewhat favoured by the government – declared itself bankrupt to avoid its creditors.

              This was not entirely the fault of the directors, who had been waiting for a promised Whitehall contract that never actually transpired (as so often).  But they had persuaded my friend’s Lottery project to hand over a sizeable cheque a couple of days before.

              It was the kind of problem that could possibly have been sorted by a heavy solicitor’s letter to bankrupt company’s owners (who were very far from bankrupt and had the same directors).  But phone calls and letters asking for advice and support to the Charities Board went unanswered.

              The weeks turned to months.  Then finally, more than six months later, the labyrinthine tentacles that make up the Lottery’s grants organisations stirred.  They sent a letter to my friend, not acknowledging his requests for support, but demanding he pay back the missing money immediately and freezing his grant.

              I have worked with funders of all sizes over the years.  I’ve worked with small funders, with whom you can have some relationship, and who can genuinely share in the achievements, frustrations and learning of a project on the ground.  That is exhilarating.

              And I have run grants from giant Lottery boards, who have no interest whatsoever in you, your project, your achievements, your lessons – beyond, of course, the miserable abstractions that pass for these things: numerical outputs.

              Such is the world of philanthropy these days.  The size of the quangos that mediate the grants is in inverse proportion to the number of small voluntary groups able to squeeze themselves into the shapes required of them.

              No wonder two per cent of ‘super-charities’ now get two thirds of the charitable income in this country.

              My prescription for the Big Lottery?  Break it up and localise it.  Then it might be effective.