By Barbara Keeley MP - 25th October 2011
Barbara Keeley MP says the level of disparity between communities in the distribution of lottery funding is "unacceptable".
My Worsley and Eccles South constituency contains a number of wards with high levels of deprivation. These wards have many needs. It might be thought that funding from lottery distributors would flow to areas of such high need, to enable support for the community to develop solutions to these issues.
However, this has not happened. Worsley and Eccles South has not benefitted much from Lottery grants. We are ranked 624th out of 650 constituencies for the grants awarded to community, arts and sports groups. Indeed, only £6m and 262 grants have ever been made to Worsley and Eccles South since 1995 by the lottery distributors.
Compare that to Cities of London and Westminster – awarded £914m and 2,231 grants. That is over 150 times as much lottery funding made to over 9 times as many groups. Other London boroughs and city constituencies like Manchester, Glasgow, Liverpool and Leeds also feature in the top twenty areas benefitting from high levels of lottery funding.
I see this level of disparity in the distribution of lottery funding as unacceptable. I understand that one of the major causes of the disparity in funding is that our communities lack the knowledge and skills to make successful lottery bids. In effect, we can only benefit from small grant programmes or programmes of grants to individuals, like Help for Heroes.
The Big Lottery has attempted to redress this through schemes like the Big Local Trust. These schemes reserved funding for areas which had been overlooked or had not gained access to other rounds of funding. One deprived ward in my constituency has been allocated £1m over 10 years under the Big Local Trust programme.
However, getting the Big Local Trust scheme off the ground has been too protracted. Local needs continue to go unmet while lottery money allocated for the benefit of our area goes unspent.
The Big Lottery was formed from the Community Fund and the New Opportunity Fund in 2004 and distributes fifty per cent of the money for good causes from the Lottery. Its costs for distribution are over £50m and it has almost 1,000 staff.
An organisation of this size and experience should by now have developed effective ways of distributing funds in areas which have underdeveloped community capacity. If local councils can manage to do this, our major distributor of lottery funding to good causes must be able to do so too. I hope they can learn lessons from what happened in my constituency to improve what they do in other areas.
Barbara Keeley has been Labour MP for Worsley and Eccles South since 2005
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