Shadow minister for civil society Gareth Thomas has called on the Big Lottery Fund to publish the 100-day progress plan agreed with Society Network Foundation for Britain’s Personal Best.
But BIG declined to release it when asked by civilsociety.co.uk, instead classifying the request as an application under the Freedom of Information Act – and thereby giving itself up to 20 working days to comply.
Because Society Network Foundation (SNF) was only awarded the £1m grant to run Britain’s Personal Best in May and the mass participation event that will be the centrepiece of the project is planned for October, a 100-day plan was agreed so that BIG can closely monitor progress against objectives.
One of the outcome indicators stated in the application form - securing three media partners by May - has already been missed.
In the application form, SNF had agreed to report monthly to BIG on the number of media partners, the number of page views of the Britain’s Personal Best website, and the number of participants registering to take part. Registration for the event opened on the website on Tuesday.
Gareth Thomas MP, who has previously cast doubt on the organisers’ ability to execute the project, said: “After the lacklustre launch of Britain’s Personal Best and continuing concerns about their ability to deliver their publicly-funded project on time, it is clear that the Social Network Foundation, a subsidiary of the Big Society Network, needs to be more transparent about how they intend to achieve their objectives in such a short timeframe.
"I am calling on BIG to publish the 100-day plan they have reportedly agreed with the Social Network Foundation, in order to allay the serious concerns being raised about the controversial funding of this project."
But a BIG spokeswoman said that "information requests such as this on individual grant management" would normally fall into the category of an FoI request.
BPB COO: 'incredibly fast turnaround'
Sukhvinder Kaur-Stubbs, chief operating officer at BPB, admitted to civilsociety.co.uk last week that the organisers had had to work "incredibly fast" to get the project up and running.
She said: "The project was officially launched on 1 May and we worked our socks off over the last ten weeks to make sure that everything was ready to go before the schools broke up.
"But we've met all the milestones we set ourselves for that and that's why we're developing in stages - because we know this isn't the sort of thing where we could just leave it all until August."
She said that 21st Century Legacy, BPB's schools partner, had emailed 500 schools about the project in early July and followed up with phone calls. There is also a link from its website to the BPB website, she added - though not from the homepage.
"Ideally it would have been nice to have had ten months to work on all of this, but we're doing it in stages and building up," Kaur-Stubbs said.
"I hope that the sector will see the potential of this and want to support us and come on board and take advantage of the branding and oportunities that are being developed."
