If, at first, you don’t succeed…

We’re still working to get key information about the Coronavirus Community Support Fund into the public domain.

The update at the end of July by the National Lottery Community Fund (NLCF) was helpful but key questions remain unanswered. It still isn’t clear, for example, what role PriceWaterhouseCoopers has in assessing (and rejecting?) bids that have already passed muster with the NLCF, or what bids have been subsequently presented to the department for approval and then been agreed or rejected for unknown reasons.

We know from the NLCF that around £55m of funding has been ‘awarded’ but have no idea how much has actually reached the bank accounts of applicant charities. We also know that at least a further £130m worth of bids is in process of being assessed, but against what criteria, above and beyond what they initially set out in the application form?

So last week we made another Freedom of Information Request, this time to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). We asked them to:

1. Please provide data about how many applicants have received grant payments from the government funding element of the CCSF, and the total value of what has been distributed, up to and including 6 August 2020.
2. Please provide details of the process and timescale for ministerial approval of CCSF grants put forward for consideration by the National Lottery Community Fund.
3. Please provide details of the ‘review of learning’ for the initial £200m tranche of the CCSF (mentioned at the link https://www.gov.uk/guidance/financial-support-for-voluntary-community-and-social-enterprise-vcse-organisations-to-respond-to-coronavirus-covid-19) including how this has informed the decision to launch the Community Match Challenge.

We’ll keep you posted when we receive a response – watch this space!