Society Network Foundation, the charity that won £1m from the Big Lottery Fund last year to run the Britain’s Personal Best Olympic legacy campaign, is again late filing its accounts with Companies House.
Its subsidiary limited company, Big Society Network (BSN), has filed its accounts this week for the year ending 31 March 2013 but once again it has filed just abbreviated unaudited accounts, as per its ‘small company’ exemption.
Society Network Foundation has never prepared a full set of accounts as it was dormant for its first two years of existence, but was nonetheless late filing its required documentation with Companies House for both those years.
Its accounts for the year to the end of March 2013 have not yet been filed with Companies House and the regulator’s website now lists them as overdue, as the nine-month deadline passed at the end of December.
This means that still none of the £3m of taxpayers’ and Lottery money that has passed through Big Society Network and Society Network Foundation since their inception just after the last election has yet appeared in any published accounts.
Gareth Thomas, the former shadow minister for civil society, had last year asked the National Audit Office to investigate the apparent favouritism shown to the two organisations by government agencies and the Big Lottery Fund.
On 2 October 2013 Amyas Morse, head of the NAO, wrote to Thomas to say that his staff had completed most of their investigations but had some final queries still to resolve and discussions to finalise with the Cabinet Office and BIG. Morse said he would write again in October to report on the outcome, but the shadow minister’s Parliamentary office confirmed this week that it had heard nothing from the NAO since.
The NAO told civilsociety.co.uk today that Morse would be writing to Thomas again shortly to update him on progress.
Britain's Personal Best
Society Network Foundation is currently engaged in running Britain’s Personal Best, a £1m Olympic Lottery-funded legacy campaign that aims to inspire 6,500 charities and community groups and 125,000 individuals to set and achieve ‘personal bests’ within its first year. According to its marketing materials, it set out to be the biggest fundraising event in the UK by 2018, in league with the likes of Comic Relief, and to have reached all corners of the globe by 2020.
After eight months, the campaign has amassed 171 Facebook ‘likes’ and its website has been tweeted 98 times. It is impossible to tell from the website how many people have been involved with Britain’s Personal Best or precisely how the £1m is being spent.
Big Society Network deficit cut
The Big Society Network (BSN) accounts show that its directors – Steve Moore, Lucy Windmill and Martyn Rose – regard Society Network Foundation as the Network’s ultimate parent company.
According to the abbreviated accounts, Big Society Network reduced its deficit to £37,000 in the year to March 2013. This follows deficits in 2012 of £180,716, and in 2011 of £25,140.
Big Society Network runs the Big Society Awards, as well as the Nexters and Spring schemes.
Loans repaid to BSN directors
The BSN accounts also show that Rose and Moore had made loans to the company and that at 31 March 2012 these had outstanding balances of £32,762 and £9,000 respectively. By the end of March 2013 however, these loans had been repaid to the directors.
When civilsociety.co.uk contacted Steve Moore to ask why Society Network Foundation was late filing its accounts, he insisted they were submitted to Companies House in December. But a spokeswoman for Companies House said that as of yesterday, the filing backlog that had built up over Christmas had been cleared and any accounts the regulator had received will have been uploaded to its website within one day.
