Differences in the costs of grant-making and lack of collaboration across the nine principal grant-makers sponsored by the DCMS are among failings identified by the Committee of Public Accounts in a report published this week. The report criticised bodies including Arts Council England (ACE), the Big Lottery Fund (BLF), the Olympic Lottery Distributor, the UK Film Council and the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council for being “conspicuously unwilling to work together or to contemplate sharing services, systems or office accommodation” to drive down costs. The bodies, which collectively awarded grants of £1.8bn in 2006/07, costing £200m in administration, were heavily criticised for having “little idea” of the cost of administering their grants programmes or of how their costs compare. The average cost of awarding £1 of grant across ranged from 3p (BLF) to 35p (ACE’s Grants for the Arts for Individuals). A National Audit Office report in June revealed that funders do not separately identify the costs of grant-making (see AP171), and are not required to do so by the DCMS. Edward Leigh MP, Chairman of the Committee of Public Accounts, pointed to the US, where government grant-making agencies share a website for grant applications. “The DCMS should encourage its own grant-makers to think also how they might collectively make use of such technology,” he said. An ACE spokesperson told AP that it has produced “savings of more than £10m on our overall administration costs” in the past five years by merging grant and management systems, and that grant logging has moved to a new national shared service centre in Manchester.