Firstly thank you to everyone who has subscribed and/or slid into my DMs with words of kindness, assistance or good old fashioned, but frankly libellous, dirt ;)
Back to the MNF. Where to begin? We’re going to have to break this down into the good, the bad, and the frankly ridiculous.
The Good
Firstly I want to state that personally, I’m all for these kinds of discretionary grant making programmes, in theory. One of my (many, many) jobs was administering a public sector/local VCSE grant scheme and I saw just how much bang for your buck you got from these incredible, hardworking and vital organisations. £3,000 to a volunteer led community organisation goes a hell of a lot further than one month’s desk based data analyst salary (that said, if you would like to pay me £3k a month to analyse your data, hit me up, I’m available).
What’s more I’ve seen how hard it is for small organisations to both find and win funding. Very few can afford a bid writer or have the time and resources to commit to jumping through excessive hoops. My last (private sector) job ran one of those “nominate a good cause” schemes, so I did, was successful and my chosen organisation should have received a nice cheque for £1,000 but instead they received a demand for the same amount of paperwork that I used to ask for when awarding three year £100k+ grants in my public sector job. They didn’t return the forms on time so received nothing. I just think the onus should be on the side who has all the funds and resources to check the legitimacy of their donations. And of course, both the application process and evaluation/reporting has to be proportionate to the size of the donation. If you raised £1,000 for charity by doing a fun run, would you demand their Articles of Association before handing over the cash?
As I said before, we already pay for refuse collection, policing and highways maintenance through our taxes. If you’re a Housing Association tenant, you’d expect your rent to cover the upkeep of your immediate area as well. In the Echo piece from April this year that gives a brief flavour of the MNF mismanagement, there is criticism of the fund being used for ‘cabaret parties’. Couldn’t be me - if I put a community event on I wouldn’t expect them to listen to Radio City or a hastily put together Spotify playlist. People deserve nice things.
Of the £6.4m funds between 2015 and 2021 I estimate nearly £2m was spent on bins, policing, pest control and the kind of thing you should expect to happen anyway. Most of the rest did seem to genuinely go to activities and organisations that I think deserved it and more than likely did amazing things with every penny. But frustratingly, we can never be sure because the record keeping is so. damn. awful.
The Bad
So I’ve already mentioned the terrible admin. I’ve been back to edit the figures on my last piece countless times as I continued to clean the data up and matched stray sums of cash to bigger suppliers. However, looking at how other councils share their data, they don’t go into much more detail - in fact sometimes less - but the quality of their data is of a much higher standard. Compare the information for one single grant from East Staffordshire Council:
Storage shed for Denstone Bowls Club
A CCF grant was awarded to the Tom Boden Sports Trust to purchase a shed. The shed will be used for storage by Denstone Bowls Club.
WARD: Churnet
Councillor: Councillor Steve Sankey
Cost of Project: £324.58
Date: Tuesday, May 17, 2022
And a typical entry from 2020/21 in Liverpool:
WARD NAME GOODS AND SERVICES REQUIRED SUPPLIER COST
ANFIELD Asda Vouchers High Street Vouchers £2,000.00
Neither goes into much detail, but while this might well be a completely legitimate use of £2,000, vague and ambiguous data like this only raises more questions than it answers.
Then there are the recipients themselves. I spotted 74 payments (totalling £60,891.63) where the supplier was a named individual (an absolute no-no according to other council policies), four of these are serving or ex-councillors and one might be the daughter of a former Lord Mayor. There is a £460 payment in 2020/21 from the Mossley Hill Residents Association for “Cllr Emily Spurrell”. This is where I’m guided by the old adage “never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity”. I think if these councillors or individuals were simply pocketing sums of council cash they would try a little bit harder to conceal it. But again, this standard of record keeping would be inadequate for the smallest workplace tea kitty.
The notorious Beautiful Ideas Company appears on the list 19 times between 2015 and 2019, receiving a total of £27,499.99 all relating to the Walton Festival except for £2,500 listed against “Business Target Hardening Fund” (target hardening generally means reinforcing your doors and windows). This includes three consecutive, identical payments of £333.33 each from Anfield Ward in 2018/19. If the reason for breaking up a grand like this was to conceal something, you have to wonder why go to the trouble when everything is already so inscrutable?
Lastly, as part of my digging into the Mayoral Neighbourhood Fund I’ve uncovered two recent Freedom of Information requests made to Liverpool City Council that were answered, but were wrong. Both left out information about payments. In these cases, I’m not so sure I can put it down to incompetence. Stay tuned for an update…
The Ridiculous
£2,000 to cosmic scouse crank Sine Missione
One councillor deciding to donate £500 from her ward’s fund to a neighbouring ward because she thought their Christmas Tree “greatly benefitted her constituents”
£9,370 renting Riverside Housing’s Poover. Don’t bother Googling, just guess.
Knotty Ash, 2016/17, £1,265, “overspend in lovin dovin” (supplier blank)
Back in 2015 before quad bikes were cool, the police were happy to be supplied with just two £400 “push bikes for flexible policing” from Wavertree’s pot.
£10,666.64 to Merseyside Police from 2016 to 2018 for “Operation Maida”. As much as I search the only operation I can find of this name is a long abandoned one to find the remains of the Moors Murderers’ victims.
There’s a residents’ association called CROW - Concerned Residents of Wavertree. No scandal, I just think that’s funny.
Old Swan, £410 for “Prof Fungus/Circus Frank”. You can guess what this was for but that’s all it says, so I like to think it was for legal advice.
£16,000 of contributions from Princes Park, Riverside and Picton to the Austin Smith Memorial Fund, a fund which issues grants of “up to £300 per organisation … for grassroots community groups in the L8 area (Riverside, Princes Park and Picton wards)”. A fund funding a fund, then. Very normal behaviour.
Thanks for reading. I will publish the spreadsheet in a semi-coherent format soon via my Twitter.
Thanks for sharing 👍