Civil servants in government departments may just have gone into purdah, that period of enforced inactivity between the election being called and taking place, but I feel as if I’ve just come out of my own personal purdah. The first quarter of this year (how is it Easter already?) has been totally consumed by tender processes, that increasingly common feature of Third Sector life. Significant announcements regarding university funding and students’ fees have passed me by in a blur while I, and half the BrightsideUNIAID team, have been utterly consumed with filling in the most remarkably impenetrable of forms. If Dante were writing the Divine Comedy today it would include a circle of hell specifically for the creators of government tender documents…
We all understand (in a way that MPs appear not to) the need for accountability with regard to government spending, but my main frustration lies with the apparent randomness with which that accountability is demanded or not. To win up to £500,000 of DCSF money, under the umbrella of the Youth Sector Development Fund, to offer mentoring services to support information advice and guidance one has to jump through hoops the number, variety and in some instances inappropriateness of which have boggled the mind. Successful organisations will be expected to submit timesheets for all staff involved, and quarterly business accounts demonstrating how every penny spent matches exactly the submitted budget (the formulas for which were so complex they took the combined brains of 3 organisations’ finance directors to sort out).
In stark contrast, to release £750,000 of DCSF money to support out-of-school-hours learning one has to write a letter to a civil servant containing a broad plan for this year’s activity and a budget of elegant simplicity. Having been successful, one has to submit a report at the end of the year to say all has gone swimmingly.
This relative lack of scrutiny isn’t right either, let’s face it (although I know which regime I’d rather work under!) and somewhere between these extremes lies a happy-ish medium. But whatever end of the scrutiny spectrum is deemed appropriate, it is a consistency of approach that is needed, rather than the capriciousness that currently seems to hold sway. So, one more thing for an incoming Government’s to-do list…
