The Big Lottery Fund has withdrawn the £1m grant awarded to the Britain’s Personal Best project after it failed to reach any of its targets.
Around £750,000 of the original grant has been paid to Society Network Foundation, the charity that was awarded the funding, but the final tranche will be withheld by BIG.
However, the charity will not be asked to pay anything back as the money has already been spent.
Society Network Foundation, the charity parent of Big Society Network, won the £1m from BIG in May last year for an Olympic legacy project called Britain’s Personal Best.
The project aimed to entice thousands of people to set themselves ‘personal best’ challenges, in all kinds of fields, and to raise sponsorship money for charities in the process.
The application – which was solicited by the Big Lottery Fund, so that SNF didn’t even have to compete for the funding – promised a £78,000 website and a million page views by October. It said that ten large charities, 1,500 small and medium-sized charities, plus 5,000 community groups would be signed up to play an active role in BPB by October last year.
BPB aimed to be the “largest mass participation event in Britain, the biggest fundraising event in history and the most successful human development event in history”.
The solicited bid was criticised by the then-shadow minister for civil society, Gareth Thomas MP, who accused BIG of being too close to ministers and of giving the grant to SNF because of its Conservative Party links, despite it appearing to have a “track record of failure”.
The charity had already failed to even launch one project that it had received £199,900 from the Cabinet Office for, and was consistently late filing its documents with Companies House.
In December BIG decided to put the grant under review because BPB was well behind its projected targets.
Now it has confirmed that the grant has been withdrawn, but SNF will not be asked to pay it back because “there is no indication that the money has been misspent”.
A BIG spokeswoman said: “We do have in place robust grant management processes, however occasionally we do have to go through the grant withdrawal process with a grant holder.
“Once the final decision has been taken to withdraw the grant, the Fund may attempt to recover all or some of the grant already drawn down by the applicant. The decision to recover is dependent on whether the funding was appropriately spent in an attempt to achieve planned project outcomes. On this occasion there is no indication that the money has been misspent, so we will not be taking action to claim the money back.”
Pressed on why SNF won the money in the first place, given its history of failed projects and lack of accountability, the spokeswoman said that BIG is in a unique position to make innovative investments and take calculated risks that other funders may not be able to.
“During the assessment of their application, the Society Network Foundation was considered in terms of their ability to deliver the relevant project outcomes and within these assessments there was consideration of the organisation’s general financial situation. The Society Network Foundation fully complied with the Big Lottery Fund’s assessment procedures.”
She added: “The Fund has very stringent procedures when it comes to assessing applications and monitoring the progress and grant spend throughout the life of the grant. Once it became clear that the project was behind its projected planned outcomes, we immediately took action.”
NAO report still to come
The National Audit Office is still to publish its report examining all the public money that has flowed to Society Network Foundation and Big Society Network since they were set up soon after the general election.
The Charity Commission is also still investigating the revelation by Civil Society News that Society Network Foundation used some of its Cabinet Office grant to reduce its historical deficit, in contravention of the terms of the grant.
