The £1m grant to Society Network Foundation for Britain’s Personal Best has been put under review by the Big Lottery Fund.

BIG chief executive Dawn Austwick confirmed to Civil Society News that the grant was placed under review in December as part of BIG’s monitoring process but she would not give any more details while the review was still live.

However, monthly progress reports to November 2013 obtained by Civil Society News under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that the project has fallen well short of many of its targets.

And Steve Moore, chief creative officer of Britain’s Personal Best (BPB) and CEO of Big Society Network, the trading subsidiary of Society Network Foundation (SNF), has removed all reference to BPB from his Twitter profile.

The grant was criticised when it was awarded last May, because BIG had invited SNF to submit the bid without making it compete for it.

The bid had been solicited despite the fact that SNF and Big Society Network had been persistently late filing their accounts with Companies House and none of the nearly £3m they had already received from statutory sources had ever been recorded in any published accounts.

And the latest of their government-funded projects, a children's sports initiative called Get In, never launched and no outcomes were ever recorded for the £199,900 they received.

Yet BIG said it solicited the bid on the basis of SNF’s track record and was confident it could deliver the project successfully.

The then-shadow minister for civil society, Gareth Thomas, suggested that BIG funded the project because of the organisers' close connections to the Conservative Party. 

‘Biggest fundraising event in the UK’

The £1m BIG grant was meant to fund a year-long Olympic legacy project culminating in a challenge weekend in October, where thousands of people would attempt to achieve their own Personal Best in any field of endeavour.  

According to Steve Moore, the project aimed to be the biggest fundraising event in the UK by 2018 and to reach “every corner of the globe” by 2020.

After the funding was confirmed in May, several full-time and contract posts were filled and by July the organisation had spent £264,005 on the project, though individual salary payments were blanked out in the Freedom of Information response.

By the end of September, the project had secured three media partners – Community Channel, BDaily and Local World, but there was no sign of those that had been mooted in the original bid - Google, YouTube, Twitter and a major national broadcaster.

Also by September, contracts were in place for BPB’s strategic partners Acevo, Groundwork UK, CSV, Navca and 21st Century. Initial payments had been made to all these groups to help them initiate their delivery programmes.

By October the project had secured support from a total of 16 charities, still well short of the end-of-project target of ten large charities, 15,000 small and medium-sized charities, and 5,000 grassroots groups.

In the October progress report, the project’s organisers admitted: “So far, our partnerships with charities and community organisations have not generated the level of web hits and registrations that we anticipated.”

Over 400 people were invited to a reception at Somerset House on 6 October to celebrate the challenge weekend; just 80 attended. 

Independent evaluation delayed

The tender for an external evaluation of the project was postponed in October “until we review the contribution of strategic partners”.

Web hits exceeded 70,000 in November, against the target of one million by the end of the project, and over 1,500 people had registered, against the target of 125,000 registrations by April 2014. 

The November report also revealed that BPB had launched a review of its strategic partners.

A spokeswoman for BIG declined to say whether the grant recipients might be asked to pay back any money.

Society Network Foundation did not respond to enquiries by deadline.