The real shame of the Big Society Network saga is the hundreds of genuine, effective charities that missed out on funding, says Tania Mason.

Anyone reading the National Audit Office report into Cabinet Office and Big Lottery funding of Big Society Network and its charity, Society Network Foundation, must wonder what kind of spell the Network had cast over the two funders.  It’s like they were hypnotised into handing over money whenever the Network looked close to running low.  

For all its protestations of independence at the time it was set up, it’s blindingly obvious now that Big Society Network was an agency of the Conservatives, and when a party gets into government it can spend taxpayers’ money however it likes.  That’s the point of getting into government.  

So if the Conservative minister for civil society wanted to give £300,000 to an outfit chaired by a Conservative stalwart (Martyn Rose), which also counted among its trustees Giles Gibbons, who co-founded Good Business with David Cameron’s former strategy chief Steve Hilton, why should he not do so?  He holds the purse strings, after all.

If it was inconvenient that this new outfit was so new it couldn’t possibly meet all the criteria that had been set for charities that wanted to access this particular pot of Cabinet Office money, then why shouldn’t this minister just change the criteria so it did fit? 

And if he wanted to do this after the application deadline had passed, why shouldn’t he? 

And if he didn’t want to tell anyone he had changed it, why should he have to? He’s the government, after all. He has the power.

And if the Big Lottery Fund, also chaired by a former Conservative MP (Peter Ainsworth), also wanted to channel lots of dosh to this organisation, why should it not just tell it to submit a bid?  Even though the organisation had shown itself so far to be wholly unaccountable and opaque, not to mention incompetent, why should it not receive another £1m?

I’ll tell you why.  Because there’s a massive opportunity cost. The fact that 1,400 genuine, established organisations who had submitted bids to the Social Action Fund (before the deadline) were turned away in favour of this new charity with no track record but strong Conservative links, is a travesty.

And the fact that this upstart went on to be awarded a further £1m from BIG when its track record was by then screaming ‘failure’ is a tragedy.  Think of what your charity could have done with all that money.  

Those who hold the purse strings do indeed hold the power, but at the end of the day it’s us, the electorate, that have to hold those people to account.

Both the Cabinet Office and BIG have cited, in their defence, the importance of funding new, experimental, innovative ideas.  I get that. But when those new ideas are so plainly flawed at the outset ("the largest mass participation event in Britain, and the biggest fundraising event in history?" Really?) and previous projects run by that team have fallen so woefully short of their targets, it’s nothing short of scandalous that public money kept flowing.

Yet nobody has taken any responsibility for any of it and nobody has been asked to pay back any money. The Cabinet Office, in its response to the NAO report, described its rules-fiddling on the Social Action Fund as “minor issues” and insisted it took a “sensible risk” in funding the organisation. 

Gareth Thomas, the former shadow charities minister, has described Big Society Network as the government’s “favourite charity” and accused those at the top of BIG of being “too close to ministers”.  He’s the opposition, you might suppose he would say that.  But the evidence in the NAO report is clear; nobody can deny now that Big Society Network got some kind of special treatment.  If it had achieved great outcomes, maybe that might have been forgiven.  But it never even looked like it, and somebody ought to be held accountable for this appalling waste of public money.