Recommendation 14

HM Government Acknowledged

The government agrees with the Committee’s recommendation. Target implementation date: December 2021 4.2 The main objective of the evaluation is to understand: • whether the funding achieved its aims of ensuring essential services were provided to vulnerable people and contribute to liquidity and staffing of VCSE organisations during the COVID-19 response; • how organisations used the grants; • the types of organisations supported and who they worked with; and • to draw out lessons about the way government responded to COVID-19 through its support of the Voluntary Community and Social Enterprise (VCSE) sector. 4.3 Part of this assessment will include an impact strand. The aim of this strand is to determine to what extent these funds made a difference for the recipient organisations and the end beneficiaries in receipt of the services provided by those organisations. There are several research questions that will form part of the overall assessment of the efficacy of the funding, including: • how many organisations did the funding reach, by services delivered (for example, tackling loneliness, homelessness etc), regions, and targeted beneficiary groups? • what value of funding did organisations receive, by different aims, regions, and targeted beneficiary groups? • what difference has the funding made to organisations reached? • what is the number and profile of vulnerable people reached? • what difference did funding make to the vulnerable people reached? 4.4 The evaluator will begin with a scoping phase, consisting of developing a theory of change to help develop a framework for assessing the impact of the funding, including key hypotheses to be tested throughout the evaluation. It will also include documentary analysis, reviewing all available documents pertaining to the fund to assess the extent to which these can answer the evaluation questions. The evaluator will then move into an analytical phase during which they will gather new evidence from grant-holders, volunteers, and beneficiaries, helping to fill any evidence gaps identified in the previous phase. The evaluator will then synthesise this broad range of evidence, before producing the final report. 4.5 The £750 million package was used to enable the continuation of VCSE organisations’ services during the pandemic, rather than create new programmes or services, and as such was one of several sources of funding used by organisations for this purpose. For this reason, it will not necessarily be possible to isolate or attribute all impacts specifically to the £750 million. The evaluators will focus on understanding impact via measuring the contribution the grant from the £750 million package made towards organisations achieving their outcomes and continuing their services. 23 4.6 Alongside this impact strand, the evaluation will also include a process strand. This will focus on what can be learned from how the intervention was delivered, such as whether the interventions were delivered as intended, and what could be improved. 4.7 Although the evaluation of the wider funding package will not be ready until December 2021, The National Lottery Community Fund published the Process Evaluation of the Coronavirus Community Support Fund (CCSF) on 5 July 2021. The evaluation found that the CCSF represented an effective route to distributing emergency response funding’ and that despite DCMS and The National Lottery Community Fund (TNLCF) staff facing a challenging situation, the funding was distributed at a pace that represented a ‘significant achievement’. The CCSF impact and value for money evaluation reports are due to be published at the end of summer 2021. 4.8 CCSF grant funding was distributed to every region and almost every local authority in England. Indicative regional funding allocations were identified at the outset to ensure appropriate distribution of funding by geography. 4.9 CCSF was successful in reaching the organisations it was intended to – most of the funding went to small or medium sized organisations who intended to deliver targeted support to people and communities disproportionately impacted by COVID-19. 4.10 45% of the grant holders were new to the department/not previously funded by TNLF which indicates breadth of reach.