Shortly before the last General Election, the TaxPayers’ Alliance produced a manifesto. Here is the latest in our series of posts looking at how the Coalition Government has performed in relation to our recommendations.
The full TaxPayers' Alliance manifesto can be found here. Click here to see the full series of posts.
After the TaxPayers’ Alliance exposed how Prevent grants were being spent, they were abolished by the Government. That was great news. The scheme was initially very opaque – the money was handed out by the Department of Communities and Local Government, and then individual councils decided how they were handed out.
But there was no record of where it had all gone. Paul Goodman, then the MP for Wycombe, tried to find out through Parliamentary Questions. But our FOI-based research was the first comprehensive list of where the grants were going, and how much each individual project was receiving. A subsequent parliamentary inquiry questioned the effectiveness of the approach.
However, there are reports that grants are starting to be handed out again by local authorities – although not under the large, expansive and expensive scheme that previously existed.