Andrew Gilligan Sunday Times article,
'Lottery thousands pay for former trans stripper to sway public opinion
After the £500,000 given to Mermaids, the same amount has gone to Stonewall to ‘empower transgender leaders’
(extract)
"David Davies, the Tory MP for Monmouth, said: “Nobody objects to grants designed to provide services to LGBT people. But my concern with grants explicitly described as being for ‘influencing’ is that the lottery is taking a clear position at one extreme of what is a highly contested political debate.
“That is explicitly prohibited by their own rules which say that ‘political activity’ cannot be funded.”
After 24 years of lottery playing, a national obsession is in decline. “It’s gone right off the radar,” said Peter Grant, former director of its new opportunities fund, now senior lecturer in public and charitable funding at the Cass Business School in London. (continues)
Yet the proceeds remain enormous — more than £1bn last year. And the BLF, the largest of the 12 grant-making bodies which hands out £500m of the annual total to community causes, may be quietly shifting its priorities.
A search of its grants database reveals that last year £5.5m was paid to projects mentioning the word “women’s”, the lowest for any full year since 2004. In the first 10 months of 2018, £3.7m was paid to women’s projects, suggesting a further drop across the full year.
In the same 10-month period, £11.6m was paid to projects mentioning the words “older people”, again indicating less than last year (£21m). The declines are only partly due to the overall fall in money raised for good causes.
The BLF said that many projects benefited women or older people without naming them in the project summary. Including these, it said, meant that spending in the last financial year was £70m for women and £83m for older people. It claimed that on this basis “average annual spending” on both groups had risen.
“I would be very sorry if the lottery has fallen out of love with the older people’s sector,” said the television presenter Dame Esther Rantzen, whose charity for the elderly, the Silver Line, had its lottery funding ended this year.
“I think they think that older people have got a lot of advantages these days because of what the media say, but that’s not looking at the truth.”
Some of the new money has gone towards increased spending on identity politics. The grants to Mermaids and Stonewall may be traceable back to an event last year held by the LGBT Consortium, an umbrella body for most of the sector’s charities and lobbyists, with the BLF’s portfolio development director, Gemma Bull.
“Basically the pitch was that public donations to LGBT organisations have gone down dramatically since equal marriage, so the lottery needs to step in,” said one person who was there.
A few months later Bull went on an LGBT leadership course run by Stonewall and this year was named as an LGBT role model by the organisation OUTstanding.
Early this year the lottery paid for the LGBT Consortium to hire a new staff member, Matt Halliday, to draw up grant applications and work on a new funding model. Halliday left in July in apparent dismay. He tweeted that he had “written to the funders of my project with a report on my project and the things I’ve seen” but neither he nor the consortium would comment last week. The BLF said it had received no report from Halliday.
It appears that neither the Mermaids nor Stonewall awards were considered at the highest levels. One former staff member said only the largest grants went to the BLF board to be scrutinised by external figures. Projects of £500,000 or less were approved by heads of funding, the 12 or so people who are part of the BLF’s middle to senior management.
They “would typically have up to 165 different funding applications to consider in a three-hour meeting”, the former officer said, which meant a little more than a minute on average for each grant. “They would make their decision based on three to four sides of A4 submitted by the funding manager responsible for assessing the application. The vast majority just went through on the nod.”
A senior BLF manager disputed this, saying a maximum of 25 applications were considered at each meeting and the paperwork ranged from 1-10 pages.
The former officer said levels of scrutiny had deteriorated in recent years because of problems with a computer system: “In order to cope, they cut down a lot of the questions they asked applicants including, crucially, on safeguarding. You used to have to describe in detail what the safeguarding risks were and how you’d address them. But now you only have to tick a box saying you’ve considered safeguarding.”
The review of the Mermaids grant could prove important in setting parameters for political grants in the future. Passions are high on both sides: MPs have weighed in and the charity’s supporters have adopted the Twitter hashtag IStandWithMermaids." continues
www.thetimes.co.uk/article/lottery-thousands-pay-for-former-trans-stripper-to-sway-public-opinion-6lw9xbwgr