Recommendation 11

The Department paid £2 million in 2020–21 to a professional services firm, PwC, to provide support on grants and operations, including checks on awards made by TNLCF for the Coronavirus Community Support Fund (CCSF).38 We asked why this additional support had been needed and how the Department ensured that it was not duplicating work already being undertaken elsewhere. The Department said that this support was not designed to take over jobs from civil servants and that the majority of the administrative work relating to the funding for charities had been completed by civil servants. The Department explained that Ministers wanted to thoroughly understand the process that was being followed and ask questions about it given the pace at which progress was needed.39 When we asked TNLFC whether it felt that it had the skills necessary to undertake this work itself it said that it was “confident in our processes in terms of making the appropriate awards.”40 We questioned the additional value that the Department received for its £2 million investment of taxpayers’ money. The Department acknowledged that the process “had not been set up in the best possible way to start with” and that ultimately very few bids were subject to detailed review.41 It changed the process after a short amount of time because it decided that reviewing awards under £10,000 was overly onerous.42