Good news that they seem to be out of the woods – for now at least.
Another member queried my suggestion regarding the costs of administration.
I have read of other transport (not solely or specifically aviation) projects over the years who had looked at obtaining a grant from HLF. Having investigated what was actually involved in obtaining a grant other projects had decided HLF funding was not the way to go.
My understanding was that there had to be a great deal of accountability for every penny that was spent and that this would involve a massive amount of administration work which inevitably meant a team of full time administrators which would cost a great deal of money.
If I have got this wrong then I apologise but I assume that someone from VTTS probably reads this and if I am wrong perhaps they could enlighten us as to exactly what restrictions in terms of accountability are placed on them by HLF and how much it costs to employ office staff to meet any HLF requirements .
From my point of view there appears to be a big wages bill for people who are not directly involved in actually putting the aeroplane into the air ie they are not aircrew or engineers.
I fully understand that there needs to be a captain to steer the ship and that there needs to be some permanent staff to help with fund raising but to me there seem to be a lot of office staff absorbing fairly significant parts of the budget. I am not entirely convinced that all these staff are needed which makes me very reluctant to put my hand in my pocket.
If I have done the project an injustice perhaps someone out there can let us have the figures to show that my perception is wrong. I am sure I am not the only person who feels this way and just maybe some of us would donate if we felt more comfortable about exactly where the biggest chunk of our donation was actually going.
As one of three volunteers, who worked with an Architect, Quantity Surveyor (QS), Construction Company and a HLF Project Monitor; I can advise that for NAM’s project we didn’t have to appoint extra staff to run a project that received a grant of £453K – this was done by the above mentioned team. The fees for the Architect and QS were covered in the HLF grant and the partnership funding that was raised by the museum volunteers.
Sure, the HLF looked at our constitution; existing policies and procedures and deemed them to be adequate to run the Hangar 2 construction project. The working relationship with the HLF Team was second to none! 🙂
As with any well run organisation you should already have good accounting practices in place that meets their requirements; something that you would need to have to comply with Charity Commission guidelines.
The subsequent HLF project monitoring documentation and reporting processes have been completed by me. Hence why I raised the point in post #3435.
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