Big Lottery Fund to "adopt the principle of full cost recovery"
Howard Lake | 1 February 2005 | News
National Lottery distributor The Big Lottery Fund has announced that, given the results of phase one of its national public consultation, it will “adopt the principle of full cost recovery by allowing all legitimate overhead costs to be recovered by voluntary and community organisations.”
This development, long requested by fundraisers of many grantmakers, is one of a series of changes to the Big Lottery Fund’s grantmaking that will be introduced following the first results from the distributor’s six month nationwide public consultation.
The Fund says that in future its grant programmes will be “flexible, demand-led and customer friendly.”
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In practice, this means that the Fund will
- introduce more flexibility in the length of funding.
- strengthen its regional offices to increase the emphasis on policy development, outreach, partnerships and external relations.
- establish two operational centres in Newcastle and Birmingham to make it easier to access funding and to ensure a strong, unified funding policy.
As the consultation results were announced, the Fund re-stated its undertaking to direct 60-70% of all its funding to voluntary and community organisations. It also re-confirmed that it will continue to fund research and international projects.
Sir Clive Booth, the Big Lottery Fund’s Chair, said: “Over the next few months, my Board will begin to work up our portfolio of new programmes. In March and May, we will consider in more detail how our funding programmes will be designed, taking full account of the outcomes of the phase two consultation, which will be published in May. And we will begin to launch our new programmes from this summer.”
The first stage of the consultation received over 2,900 responses over six months. The Board’s decisions, based on this consultation, will affect grantmaking between 2005 and 2009.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.