Author: Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts

Publisher: The Stationery Office

Published: 2007-10-23

Total Pages: 68

ISBN-13: 9780215036711

Since it was set up in 1994, the Heritage Lottery Fund has awarded £3.8 billion of funding to some 24,000 projects covering all types of heritage with a wide range of benefits. The Fund operates within a framework of policy directions issued by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and currently distributes one sixth of the money raised by the National Lottery for good causes. Following on from a NAO report (HCP 323, session 2006-07; ISBN 9780102944624) published in March 2007, the Committee's report looks at how the money has been spent, what has been achieved, and the effectiveness of the grant-making process to ensure value for money. Conclusions reached include that the Fund has successfully reduced the amount of undistributed money it holds but spends around nine per cent of its annual income on administration. Many applicants find the Fund's application and assessment processes confusing, off-putting, and unnecessarily burdensome, and there are significant variations in funding between regions. The Fund is not able to demonstrate effectively its impact in opening up the heritage to people from deprived or minority backgrounds. Although projects are largely delivered to time and cost, the Fund needs to do more to tackle the poor project management skills of some grant recipients. From April 2009, the Government intends to divert more than £160 million from the Fund to help pay for the 2012 Olympics and the Fund's income may be further reduced by as much as £95 million if ring-fenced income from Olympic lottery games diverts sales from other lottery games.