Spending Review: Share your views
9th August 2010
Help inform our submission to the Spending Review by sharing your views on a variety of funding and finance issues by Thursday 19th August.
The Spending Review is a cross-government programme to review and determine its spending priorities for the next five years. Given the potentially damaging impact of forthcoming cuts, we will be making a submission to government to demonstrate the value of the work of the voluntary and community sector. Read our discussion paper (PDF) for more details.
In order to build our evidence base, we're looking to you for examples of best funding practice. To contribute to our submission, to ask any questions about our initial briefing (PDF) or to discuss the Spending Review, please contact James Allen (020 7520 2475) before 5pm on Thursday 19th August.
Comments
1 Commissioners need to understand the law and know when they can give grants and not have to tender. They often hide behind law they don't understand and so tender everything to 'play safe'. Where a tender is required proportionality is key: the level of work required must be proportionate to the value of the contract and the risk. For standardisation and ease for the commissioners the same process may be required for a £20,000 contract as for a £200,000 contract or a £2,000,000. This penalises and places barriers to entry to contracting for small organsiations as it reduces the amount available for the contract if disproportionate amounts are eaten up in reporting. It also reduced the proportion of the contract spent on actually delivering the outcomes.
2 Direct working with local level support organisations (CVS and others) who can invest in the relationships required to support locally appropriate commissioning and procurement. Ensuring local support organisations can be skilled up on both commissioning and parntership/merger brokerage and their time resources to support smaller groups - this is development work but work that will help cement Big Society and embed in in the locality the abitlity to work together or merge to take on contracts with a cost effective and local core.
3 A value assigned to local - small groups or groups that bring added value through their other activity may not have economies of scale on the bottom line of the contract but may save resources (Time and money ) by having the links that non-local players would need to spend time adn money building. Why re-invent the wheel?
4 See 2 above - support the local support orgs to work together and to work directly with commissioners and potential contract holders to bring them together. If the funding is via those local authorities commissioners then the potential independence of the support organisations is compromised to carry out this role.
5 Simplyfying the record keeping and verification required for Gift Aid would help.
6 Certainly charities should be exempt form the VAT increase as of 1st Jan 2011. £70,000 threshold should be raised for charities. Ideally charities should be exempt from VAT altogether!
7 We have had some innovative programmes combining training and support to move the vcs towards being better able to tender for projects. Involving the sector more in commjissioning decisions, framing the situation would be really good. Where this has been tried often the amount of resource requried by a statutory partner to engage has been underestimated and they struggle to maintain relationships built via one process, so have to rebuild each time.